Safely Trash Changes With Git

git trash is an alias I’ve been using for a long time to remove any staged and unstaged changes in the current repository and reset to a clean state. This is very useful when experimenting with some throw away code that you won’t need anymore. However, after several times of accidentally running this command with some changes I actually wanted to keep, it was time for some changes.

My original version of git trash was the following which reverts all changes to tracked files and deletes any untracked files.

[alias]
  trash = !git reset --hard && git clean -fd

The problem with this approach, is the changes are gone for good when you run it. There is no way to recover them if you run git trash accidentally. A solution to this problem is surprisingly simple: just commit and revert the changes.

Because the goal of git trash is to just delete changes without committing them, running git commit followed by git revert isn’t a solution since I don’t want to end up with that in the history of the branch. Instead, you can commit and then reset the commit which will remove the commit from history. But, while the commit is no longer present in the branch history, it still exists in the reflog. which can be used to recover the trashed changes.

if [ -n "$(git status --porcelain)" ]; then
  git add -A
  git commit -qm 'trashing'
  git reset -q --hard HEAD~1
else
  echo 'No changes to discard'
  exit 1
fi

Since I wanted to keep the git trash alias, I rewrote the above script as a very gross looking inline function:

[alias]
  trash = "!f() { if [ -n \"$(git status --porcelain)\" ]; then git add -A && git commit -qm 'trashing' && git reset -q --hard HEAD~1; else echo 'No changes to discard'; exit 1; fi; }; f"

With this setup, it’s time to start trashing some code!

echo "I'm going to be trashed" >test.txt
git trash
git show 'HEAD@{1}'

After running these commands, the repo should be in a clean state, but the commit details printed by running git show will show that the trashed changes still exist in the reflog.

commit 2e3f57a1
Author: Mark Skelton
Date:   Mon Nov 4 17:26:02 2024 -0600
​
    trashing
​
diff --git a/test.txt b/test.txt
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..7639cf5a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/test.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+I'm going to be trashed

Running git reflog makes it easier to see what’s going on here:

96beb357 (HEAD -> main, origin/main, origin/HEAD) HEAD@{0}: reset: moving to HEAD~1
2e3f57a1 HEAD@{1}: commit: trashing
96beb357 (HEAD -> main, origin/main, origin/HEAD) HEAD@{2}: commit: Write blog post

In both the git show and git reflog commands the commit sha of 2e3f57a1 is printed which can be used to recover the trashed changes:

git checkout 2e3f57a1

After checkout out the commit, all the changes you trashed will be restored. At this point it’s as simple as committing any or all of the trashed changes to a branch to then continue working on them from there.