How to Recover Deleted Git Stashes

Takahiro Iwasa

8/5/2017

1 min read

Git

This note describes how to identify and recover deleted stashes.

Output Commit History

Use the following command to output commit history and identify dangling commits:

git fsck | awk '/dangling commit/ {print $3}' >> commit_list.txt

The output will look something like this:

1
dangling commit bfebf68feeebf07a86d7e3e4da77962de67c14ee
2
dangling commit 86f4aec78bd51c80b0fd2d5d83963a2259dc72b4
3
dangling commit 48fd9f8f97a577bc8a87b133f6e1dd789a692bd0
4
dangling commit 64ff8c33fb878afb8bf5c99c1b8d8fdfaa1b1f3c
5
dangling commit bdff88e13803e6c7737691aa1fb6f1e038321966

Output Commit Summaries

To review commit details, run the following script:

#!/bin/bash

while read line
do
  git show $line
done < ./commit_list.txt

This will display summaries of the dangling commits:

1
commit bfebf68feeebf07a86d7e3e4da77962de67c14ee
2
Merge: b046240 5ee731a
3
Author: Takahiro Iwasa <[email protected]>
4
Date:   Fri Feb 12 22:01:47 2016 +0900
5

6
    On develop: 0212

Restore Selected Commits

Carefully review the commit summaries and use the date, time, and commit message to identify the commits you wish to restore.

Finally, restore the identified commits using git cherry-pick. Use the following command:

git cherry-pick -n -m1 <YOUR_COMMIT_ID>