What is the purpose of git stash create and git stash store?

Question

From the documentation at git-scm, there are two git stash commands that mention relevance to scripting, but not general use:

create

Answer 1

Unfortunately the nice example that Andrew showed above does not work in all cases, because:

• If there are local changes then git stash create will create an unreferenced commit, but it won't actually clear the local changes.

• If there are not any local changes, then it won't create a commit at all (as BlackVegetable pointed out). In that case we should not apply at the end.

• (And minor: Andrew forgot to keep and use the commit ID produced by create.)

With that in mind, it appears to me that the usage should be like this:

# Save the local changes, keep a reference to them, and clear them
stashed_commit="$(git stash create)"
git reset --hard

# Do your thing
git fetch
git rebase

# If there were local changes, then restore them
if [ -n "${stashed_commit}" ]
then git stash apply "${stashed_commit}"
fi

Unwieldy to say the least!

Alas. It would be far simpler if I could just git stash save --allow-empty at the top, and git stash pop at the bottom.

I would love to be wrong. Please correct me!