How to recover a dropped stash in Git?

Question

I frequently use git stash and git stash pop to save and restore changes in my working tree. Yesterday I had some changes in my working tree that I

Answer 1

What I came here looking for is how to actually get the stash back, regardless of what I have checked out. In particular, I had stashed something, then checked out an older version, then poped it, but the stash was a no-op at that earlier time point, so the stash disappeared; I couldn't just do git stash to push it back on the stack. This worked for me:

$ git checkout somethingOld
$ git stash pop
...
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)
Dropped refs/stash@{0} (27f6bd8ba3c4a34f134e12fe69bf69c192f71179)
$ git checkout 27f6bd8ba3c
$ git reset HEAD^    # Make the working tree differ from the parent.
$ git stash # Put the stash back in the stack.
Saved working directory and index state WIP on (no branch): c2be516 Some message.
HEAD is now at c2be516 Some message.
$ git checkout somethingOld # Now we are back where we were.

In retrospect, I should have been using git stash apply not git stash pop. I was doing a bisect and had a little patch that I wanted to apply at every bisect step. Now I'm doing this:

$ git reset --hard; git bisect good; git stash apply
$ # Run tests
$ git reset --hard; git bisect bad; git stash apply
etc.