From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Dangers of reset --hard (Re: Implicit stashes)
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:12:17 -0500
Message-ID: <20100630161217.GE18813@burratino>
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Cc: John Tapsell <johnflux@gmail.com>, Git List <git@vger.kernel.org>,
	Stephan Beyer <s-beyer@gmx.net>,
	Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org>
To: Will Palmer <wmpalmer@gmail.com>
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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.