How to cherry-pick from stash in git?

Question

I am wondering if cherry-picking from stash is possible.

git stash save "test cherry-pick from stash"

*git cherry-pick stash@{0}* --> Is this possible?

I am getting the following exception when I tried above command:

Error:

~/Documents$ git cherry-pick stash@{0}
error: Commit 4590085c1a0d90de897633990f00a14b04405350 is a merge but no -m option was given.
fatal: cherry-pick failed

Answer 1

The problem is that a stash consists of two or three commits. When stashing, the modified working tree is stored in one commit, the index in one commit, and (if using the --include-untracked flag) any untracked files in a third commit.

You can see this if you use gitk --all and do a stash.

stash@{0} points to the commit that contains the working tree.

You can however cherry-pick from that commit if you do

git cherry-pick "stash@{0}" -m 1

The reason that cherry-pick thinks that the stash is a merge, and thus needs the -m 1 parameter is that the stash commit has multpile parents, as you can see in the graph.

I am not sure exactly what you want to achieve by cherry-picking. A possible alternative is to create a branch from the stash. Commit changes there and merge them to your current branch.

git stash branch stashchanges
git commit -a -m "changes that were stashed"
git checkout master
git merge stashchanges

Answer 2

I have not done this before. But the man-page on cherry-pick says that it works on commits only.

   Given one or more existing commits, apply the change each one introduces,
   recording a new commit for each. This requires your working tree to be
   clean (no modifications from the HEAD commit).

Stashing is not a commit and doesn't move HEAD. So, this cannot be done [this is only a guess though]