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gitcherry-pick

How to cherry-pick from stash in git?

I am wondering if cherry-picking from stash is possible.

git stash save "test cherry-pick from stash"

git cherry-pick stash@{0} # --> Is this possible?

I am getting the following error when I tried above command:

~/Documents$ git cherry-pick stash@{0}
error: Commit 4590085c1a0d90de897633990f00a14b04405350 is a merge but no -m option was given.
fatal: cherry-pick failed
Solution

  • The problem is that a stash consists of two or three commits. When stashing, the modified working tree is stored in one commit, the index in one commit, and (if using the --include-untracked flag) any untracked files in a third commit.

    You can see this if you use gitk --all and do a stash.

    enter image description here

    stash@{0} points to the commit that contains the working tree.

    You can however cherry-pick from that commit if you do

    git cherry-pick "stash@{0}" -m 1

    The reason that cherry-pick thinks that the stash is a merge, and thus needs the -m 1 parameter is that the stash commit has multpile parents, as you can see in the graph.

    I am not sure exactly what you want to achieve by cherry-picking. A possible alternative is to create a branch from the stash. Commit changes there and merge them to your current branch.

    git stash branch stashchanges
git commit -a -m "changes that were stashed"
git checkout master
git merge stashchanges