git stash: how to apply unstaged file from stash

git-stash-apply-unstaged.md

Thanks for the update. If git stash apply didn’t restore your staged changes, it’s very likely that:

🧠 Your staged changes are in the stash, but not restored by default

When you run:

git stash apply

…it only restores unstaged (working directory) changes by default — not the staged (index) part.

To bring back the staged changes you must apply with the index, like this:

git stash apply --index

This tells Git:

“Also restore the index (staged changes) that were saved in the stash.”

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✅ Try This Now:

1. List your stash entries to confirm one still exists:

git stash list

If there's a stash entry (e.g., stash@{0}), then:

2. Inspect that stash to see what it holds:

git stash show -p --stat stash@{0}

3. Now apply the stash including the staged changes:

git stash apply --index stash@{0}

4. If you already applied the stash without --index, you can still drop and reapply it properly:

git stash pop --index stash@{0}

pop applies the stash and removes it from the stash list, unlike apply.

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🚨 If You Already Popped or Dropped the Stash

If you've already run git stash pop or deleted the stash, you can try to recover it from reflog:

git reflog

Look for a line like:

stash@{0}: WIP on ...

or:

HEAD@{X}: stash: created ...

Then you can checkout or diff the stash commit:

git checkout <stash-commit-hash>

Or extract just the staged changes from it.

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Let me know what you see in your git stash list and we can work through it precisely.