Purpose

Retrieve changes from a remote "working clone" of a project to your local development machine

On remote "working clone" ...

where you've done some changes to be recovered, procede as follows:

1. Move changes to be recovered to a work branch, and commit them:

git stash
git checkout -b dirty
git stash apply

git add .
git commit -m "my new nice changes"

2. Check the id of the new commit:

$ git log --oneline
eddc3c6 (HEAD -> dirty) my new nice changes
...

3. Build a single patch file referring to the specific commit:

git format-patch -o patches/ -1 eddc3c6

or

git format-patch -o patches/ -1 HEAD

4. Sent it to the developer:

http://brainstorm.it/snippets/send-email-command-line/

or download from development machine via rsync:

rsync -a --rsync-path="sudo rsync" master@host:/home/project/project/patches .

5. Later (after the changes have been integrated in the main project), you might want to cleanup your working clone:

git checkout master
git branch -D dirty
rm -fr ./patches

On your development machine ...

Apply the changes:

$ git am patches/0001-retrieve_avatars-fixes.patch

Note that, as a result of applying the patch, the changes have already been committed to your working branch:

$ git log --oneline
de4ccec (HEAD -> master) my new nice changes