Version Control with Git, 3rd Edition

Chapter 17. Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

With a plethora of commands and options, Git is a rich resource for performing varied and powerful changes to a repository. Sometimes, though, the actual steps to accomplish a particular task are a bit elusive. Sometimes the purpose of a particular command and option isn’t really clear or becomes lost in a technical description.

This chapter provides a collection of tips, tricks, and techniques that highlight Git’s ability to do interesting transformations.

Interactive Rebase with a Dirty Working Directory

Frequently, when developing a multicommit change sequence on a local branch, we realize we need to make an additional modification to a commit we made earlier in the sequence. Rather than scribbling a note about it on the side and coming back to it later, as an option we can immediately edit and introduce that change directly into a new commit and add a note in the commit log entry reminding us that it should be squashed into a previous commit.

However, when we eventually get around to cleaning up our commit sequence and want to use git rebase -i, we might find ourselves with a dirty working directory. In this case, Git will refuse to do the rebase:

    $ git show-branch --more=10
    [main] Tinker bar
    [main^] Squash into 'More foo and bar'
    [main~2] Modify bar
    [main~3] More foo and bar
    [main~4] Initial foo and bar.

    $ git rebase -i main~4
    error: cannot rebase: You have unstaged changes.
    error: Please commit or stash them.
    

If this happens, ...