Git stash single untracked file?

Question

Question

I have a couple of edited files as listed below, and I also have some newly created files:

Now I want to stash the untracked file (in this case, it's db/migrate/20161212071336_add_paranoid_fields.rb) but not stash the changed files.

How should I do that?

Why I want to stash a single untracked file

I created this file at first, and then I realised that I don't need it immediately (it needs to be deleted in order for my program to work correctly); but I might need it in the future.

What I've searched (and not giving me an answer), and the reason why they don't help

• How do you stash an untracked file?
  • This would stash all files; I want to stash only a single file.
• How can I git stash a specific file?
  • it suggests using stash -p, but this would only stash the tracked file.

Answer 1

If you only have this one untracked file you can do:

git add -u
git stash --include-untracked --keep-index

And that will add only untracked files to the stash, and remove them from the working directory.

If you have several untraked files and you want to include just this one to the stash, then you will have to do a commit, then the stash of the single file and then a reset

git add -u
git commit -m "temp commit"
git add my_file_to_stash
git stash
git reset --hard HEAD^

The subtlely here is that when you recover the stash later, that file will be added to the index. That is probably a good thing, as it will remind you that this file is important.