Git pushd & popd? I.e., checkout last state

Question

I'm writing a Bash script, and I want to checkout a tag and then checkout back to where I started.

I tried git co HEAD@{1}, but when starting at master, that takes me back to the commit SHA of master but with a detatched head.

Is there something like pushd & popd for Git?

wnoise · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-01T07:50:28.183

28

git checkout @{-1} which can be abbreviated to git checkout -.

From the manpage:

As a special case, the "@{-N}" syntax for the N-th last branch checks out the branch (instead of detaching). You may also specify - which is synonymous with "@{-1}".

edited Mar 01 '11 at 07:50

answered Mar 01 '11 at 05:53

wnoise

9,764
37
47

2

This is awesome! +1 for that simple way. – eckes Mar 01 '11 at 06:01
1

In which version of git can you do `git checkout -1`? It doesn't work in git 1.7.1 and the man page says that `git checkout -` is equivalent to `git checkout @{-1}` – Mark Longair Mar 01 '11 at 06:56
@Mark Longair: None. I misremembered. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll fix that. – wnoise Mar 01 '11 at 07:48
2

Of course! How intuitive. :) I should've tried that. That's just like `cd -`. – ma11hew28 Mar 01 '11 at 15:56
This is not the same. E.g. if you run git pull, `git checkout -` will take you back where you were before checking out the current (pulled) branch. – Ondra Žižka Nov 29 '17 at 16:54

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 01 '11 at 05:56

EDIT: wnoise's suggestion will work if you don't want to keep an explicit history the way pushd/popd does. If you do (and don't want an ordinary checkout to affect your LRU):

I don't know of anything that will do what you want out of the box, but it's not to hard to hack together something along those lines. If you add a file named git-foo to your PATH, you get a new git foo command. So, git-pushd could look like:

#!/bin/bash

SUBDIRECTORY_OK=1
. $(git --exec-path)/git-sh-setup

git symbolic-ref HEAD | sed s_refs/heads/__ >> $GIT_DIR/.pushd
git checkout "$@"

And git-popd:

#!/bin/bash

SUBDIRECTORY_OK=1
. $(git --exec-path)/git-sh-setup

REF=$(head -n1 $GIT_DIR/.pushd)

[ -n "$REF" ] || die "No refs to pop"
git checkout "$REF" && sed -i -e '1d' $GIT_DIR/.pushd

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:09

In your script, first save the current branch (like written in this answer):

branch_name="$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null)" ||
branch_name="(unnamed branch)"     # detached HEAD
branch_name=${branch_name##refs/heads/}

then go and checkout the tag you want to

git checkout -b tag_branch tag_name

Do what you want to do on that branch, then checkout the old branch again:

git checkout $branch_name

That's it.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 19 '22 at 15:41

You can also do it with aliases and /tmp/gitStack as a temporary file to track your stack.

Checkout the main aliases I've made:

[alias]
  pushd         = "!f() { _BRANCH=$(git symbolic-ref head); _BRANCH=${_BRANCH#'refs/heads/'}; echo $_BRANCH >> /tmp/gitStack; git checkout $@;}; f "
  pop           = "!f() { _BRANCH=$(tail -1 /tmp/gitStack); git checkout ${_BRANCH%*:}; head -n+1 /tmp/gitStack > /tmp/_gitStack; mv /tmp/_gitStack /tmp/gitStack; }; f"
  pop-clear     = "!f() { rm /tmp/gitStack; }; f"
  pop-list      = "!f() { cat /tmp/gitStack 2> /dev/null; }; f"

Git pushd & popd? I.e., checkout last state

4 Answers4

Linked