Re: Dangers of reset --hard (Re: Implicit stashes)

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Will Palmer wrote:

> I tend to want "do a git reset --hard, but fail if anything would be
> lost".

At the risk of being redundant: try git reset --keep.  If it succeeds,
you can use git diff --cached HEAD and git diff to check how close it
was to being equivalent to a hard reset.

> The use-case here is that when I reset --hard, I want a
> completely clean copy- but I don't want to accidentally lose anything.

There is one case when I truly want a completely clean copy (including
no untracked files): when I am testing and a bit paranoid.  For that,
I do something like the following:

 ; mkdir /tmp/test-dir
 ; git archive HEAD | (cd /tmp/test-dir && tar -xf -)
 ; cd /tmp/test-dir

and work from there.  I would not be surprised if the needs of your
case are different, though.