Practical Git Tips: Rebase, Cherry‑pick, Stash and Common Scenarios

Most Git tutorials teach git add and git push , while commands like git rebase are rarely covered; many developers are warned that rebase is dangerous and stick to git merge . This guide explains rebase and also dives into git cherry-pick , git stash , and other useful Git operations.

Eight common situations are presented to test your Git knowledge:

Accidentally committing a new feature to the wrong branch.

Merging a feature into master only to be told the feature is no longer needed.

Needing to pull the latest master while you have uncommitted work.

Realizing a recent commit has an incorrect message.

Being asked to modify an earlier commit after a code review.

Multiple commits with wrong messages that need fixing.

Consolidating dozens of commits into one for a clean review.

Correcting a commit message that is already on master with many subsequent commits.

Problem 1 – Wrong Branch Commit : Use git cherry-pick to copy the desired commit(s) to the correct branch without affecting the original branch. Example: git cherry-pick 123abc 456def 789ghi . If the cherry‑pick results in an empty commit, you can skip it with git cherry-pick --skip or abort with git cherry-pick --abort .

Problem 2 – Unwanted Feature Merge : Revert the merge using git revert with the appropriate commit range, e.g., git revert abcdef123..7890abcd , to create a new commit that undoes the changes.

Problem 3 – Pulling master Without Committing : Stash your current changes with git stash , update from master , then restore the work with git stash apply (or git stash pop to drop the stash). Use git stash list to view saved stashes and specify a particular stash if needed.

Problem 4 – Wrong Commit Message : Amend the most recent commit with git commit --amend . This opens the editor (often Vim); edit the message, then save and quit (e.g., Esc :wq ).

Problem 5 – Fixing an Earlier Commit : Run an interactive rebase starting before the target commit, e.g., git rebase -i <hash_of_commit_before_target> . Change the command from pick to edit for the commit you want to modify, make the code changes, stage them, and then use git commit --amend followed by git rebase --continue . The interactive rebase supports many commands ( pick , reword , edit , squash , fixup , drop , etc.).

Problem 6 – Multiple Wrong Messages : Use the same interactive rebase approach, selecting reword or edit for each problematic commit, or simply revert and recommit if the history is already public.

Problem 7 – Squashing Many Commits : Create a merge request to view the diff, then cherry‑pick the relevant commits onto a new branch and run git rebase -i with squash to combine them into a single commit before merging.

Problem 8 – Fixing a Message on master : Because the commit is already on a shared branch, the safest approach is to git revert the faulty commit and create a new commit with the correct message, avoiding a history rewrite that would affect many downstream commits.

Recovery Tips : If a rebase or cherry‑pick goes wrong, abort with git rebase --abort or git cherry-pick --abort . Use git reflog to locate previous HEAD positions and reset with git reset --hard <hash> (or --soft / --mixed for safer resets).