Git stash seems to do a lot of what I want, except that it is a little hard to script, as the if you have no changes, then git stash; git stash pop will do some
From git doc: http://git-scm.com/docs/git-stash
drop [-q|--quiet] []
Remove a single stashed state from the stash list. When no is given, it removes the latest one. i.e. stash@{0}, otherwise must be a valid stash log reference of the form stash@{}.
example:
git stash drop stash@{5}
This would delete the stash entry 5. To see all the list of stashes:
git stash list