The Git stash does not work like a one-slot clipboard and you might shoot yourself in the foot if you pretend otherwise.

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In particular git stash apply does not remove the stashed changes from the stash. That means you will probably apply the wrong stash when you do git stash apply after a future stashing.

To keep your stash clean, you can use

git stash pop

instead.

Another way to look at it:

git stash pop 

is the same as

git stash apply && git stash drop

Notice: In case of a conflict git will not pop the changes, you will need to drop the uppermost stash, if you merged successfully:

git stash drop