Is it possible to preview stash contents in git?

Question

I often put work away for later, then other stuff comes along, and a few weeks later, I want to inspect the stash, and find out what changes it would make if I applied it to

Answer 1

First we can make use of git stash list to get all stash items:

$git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on ...
stash@{1}: WIP on ....
stash@{2}: WIP on ...

Then we can make use of git stash show stash@{N} to check the files under a specific stash N. If we fire it then we may get:

$ git stash show stash@{2}
fatal: ambiguous argument 'stash@2': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git  [...] -- [...]'

The reason for this may be that the shell is eating up curly braces and git sees stash@2 and not stash@{2}. And to fix this we need to make use of single quotes for braces as:

git stash show stash@'{2'}
com/java/myproject/my-xml-impl.xml                     | 16 ++++++++--------
com/java/myproject/MyJavaClass.java                    | 16 ++++++++--------
etc.