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I'm currently trying to find some changes in a stash, which I know is stash@{1}. For this, I'm using git grep:

git grep somePattern stash@{1}

This returns me what I'm searching for.

However, when running git stash show, these changes aren't here and I get a different diff, not containing my changes.

git stash show stash@{1}

Same thing if I try to git stash apply said changes.

Is there any behavior of git stash that is preventing changes to be part of this stash when showing/applying it?

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2 Answers 2

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git grep searches for a pattern in the complete content of a commit (not just the changes it introduced).

If somePattern is present in any other file (including a file not changed in the stash), you will see an output.

If you want to spot files where the changes contain the pattern, instead of git grep, try one of :

git show -S somePattern stash@{1} # or : git show -G somePattern stash@{1}

In your case : it looks like the pattern you are looking for is not part of the changes of stash@{1}.

If you want to inspect the content of all your stash entries, use one of the -S or -G options on git reflog stash :

# * you also need the '-m' option when inspecting the stash, because all # stash entries are actually merge commits # * '-p' will print the patch of files matching the pattern, and will # allow you to see if those are the changes you are looking for git reflog --oneline -m -S somePattern -p stash
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Be careful with git show here: you'll need -m and/or --first-parent. (With an upcoming Git, there's a new flag that means -m --first-parent.)
Thank you for this. I've tried both commands, and they still didn't show the diff I was searching for. Also, somePattern doesn't seem to be present in current commit state: - If I git grep somePattern stash@{1}, it shows the file - If I cat path-of-file-from-that-grep-output, the change is not there. So logically, it should be present in the git show or git stash show output?
@torek : I had forgotten a stash is a merge commit, updating my answer. Thanks. [edit] I need the -m option for git reflog -S ..., but git show -S ... works straight away (the diff is presented in the combined diff format by default). Is this behavior a recent change ?
You'll get a diff if the merged file is "different from all parents" (so, different from both index and previous-commit). I may have overstated the case in my own answer: if you haven't git add-ed a file, you can get a diff. Still, the combined diff will drop some changes from this diff. It's never been completely clear to me which diff hunks get dropped in combined diffs; I should take some time to study that...
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There are multiple possible reasons for this:

  • A stash is actually a complex of two (or sometimes three) commits. The git grep operation looks in the W (work-tree) commit, completely ignoring the I (index-state) commit.1

  • As LeGEC notes, git stash show generates a diff. The diff is from the W commit's parent to the W commit.

  • It's easy to accidentally run git show stash instead of git stash show. This works, for some definition of work, but also fails because a stash is a complex of commits. The W commit has the form of a merge commit.2 This makes git show use a combined diff to show it, and because of the way stashes are built, this combined diff can be completely empty (it depends on what you've git add-ed when you run git stash).

It's hard to know precisely which of these issues you might have hit, but all of them will cause confusion.

1If a third commit exists, it holds the untracked files, and git grep ignores it too. That's because refs/stash, or stash@{whatever}, points to the W commit.

2This means that the W commit is a merge commit. But it wasn't made by git merge, and the normal Git tools, applied to it, produce nonsensical results. The reason W is a merge is to be able to find the rest of the stash commits, plus the commit from which the stash was made, all with simple gitrevisions syntax.

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