Put Your Work on Pause

Sometimes you're in the middle of working on something, but you need to switch to a different task quickly like fixing a bug in another branch, or maybe you just want to save your progress without committing it yet. You don't want to commit half-finished work, but you also don't want to lose what you've done.

This is where git stash comes in.

A stash takes your uncommitted changes, saves them aside, and gives you a clean working directory. Later, you can bring those changes back.

  Working Directory                          Stash
 ┌──────────────────┐    git stash       ┌──────────────┐
 │  uncommitted     │──────────────────> │  saved       │
 │  changes         │                    │  changes     │
 │                  │ <──────────────────│              │
 └──────────────────┘    git stash pop   └──────────────┘
       (clean)

Let's simulate this. Add a division function but don't commit it:

cat << 'EOF' > calculator.py
# calculator.py - A simple calculator

def add(a, b):
    """Add two numbers and return the result."""
    return a + b

def subtract(a, b):
    """Subtract b from a and return the result."""
    return a - b

def multiply(a, b):
    """Multiply two numbers and return the result."""
    return a * b

def divide(a, b):
    """Divide a by b and return the result."""
    if b == 0:
        return "Error: Cannot divide by zero"
    return a / b

# Try it out
result_add = add(5, 3)
result_sub = subtract(10, 4)

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