Viewing the changes in a Git stash

It’s a good idea to name our stashes if some time is likely to pass between stashing and picking up the work again, but sometimes we need even more information, which is where the show command comes in:

git stash show

This will tell you the following about the most recent stash:

• which files were changed
• the number of changes in each file
• the total number changes in all the files

It’s possible to specify the stash too; just find the index number of the stash you’d like more details on and run:

git stash show stash@{2}

In this example, we’d be looking at the third most recent stash.

This is a nice overview and may be enough to jog your memory, but what if you need even more?

Viewing the diff

To see the actual changes, line by line, to the files in a stash, we can use the --patch flag (or -p for short):

git stash show -p

This will show the diff of the most recently stashed stash, but of course we can choose any from our list of stashes by adding the index:

git stash show -p stash@{2}