Re: [PATCH] Document 'stash clear' recovery via unreachable commits

On 2009.08.08 18:25:55 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Thomas Rast [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Add an example to the stash documentation that shows how to quickly
find candidate commits among the 'git fsck --unreachable' output.

Thanks.

quoted

Unless you have merges of branch names containing WIP, or edit your
merge messages to say WIP, there will be no false positives.

That may be true, but I suspect that people's stash entries that are worth
saving are given their own messages with "git stash save 'message'" and do
not necessarily say WIP.  I wish if there were a better way to identify
them, but I do not think of any offhand.

Here's what I have now:

git fsck --unreachable | grep commit | cut -d\  -f3 |
xargs git log --no-walk --merges \
	--grep='^\(WIP on \|On \)\((no branch)\|[^ ]\+\):'

Should catch stashes with and without user-supplied messages and avoid
most false-positives. Drop the "WIP on " option from the grep to capture
just those that have a user-supplied message.

To try really really hard to get stash stuff only, one could add some
extra stuff to verify that the second parent's commit message is
"index on \2:" (\2 being the second group from the above --grep). But
that's probably total overkill...

Björn