Git stash: "Cannot apply to a dirty working tree, please stage your changes"

Question

I am trying to apply changes I stashed earlier with git stash pop and get the message:

Cannot apply to a dirty working tree, please stage your changes

Any suggestion on how to deal with that?

Answer 1

Either clean your working directory with git reset, commit the changes, or, if you want to stash the current changes, try:

$ git stash save "description of current changes"
$ git stash pop stash@{1}

This will stash the current changes, and then pop the second stash from the stash stack.

Answer 2

You have files that have been modified but not committed. Either:

git reset --hard HEAD (to bring everything back to HEAD)

or, if you want to save your changes:

git checkout -b new_branch
git add ...
git commit
git checkout -b old_branch
git stash pop

Answer 3

You can do this without having to stash your current changes by exporting the stash you want as a patch file and manually applying it.

For example, say you want to apply stash@{0} to a dirty tree:

1. Export stash@{0} as a patch:

   git stash show -p stash@{0} > Stash0.patch

2. Manually apply the changes:

   git apply Stash0.patch

If the second step fails, you will have to edit the Stash0.patch file to fix any errors and then try git apply again.

Answer 4

When I have to apply stashed changes to a dirty working copy, e.g. pop more than one changeset from the stash, I use the following:

$ git stash show -p | git apply && git stash drop

Basically it creates a patch, pipes that to the apply command and if that succeeds without conflicts it drops the just applied stash item...

I wonder why there is no -f (force) option for git stash pop which should exactly behave like the one-liner above.

Answer 5

None of these answers actually work if you find yourself in this situation as I did today. Regardless of how many git reset --hard's I did, it got me nowhere. My answer (not official by any means was):

1. Figure out the stash's hash use git reflog --all
2. Merge that hash with the branch you're interested in