From: Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 07 Aug 2010 03:10:28 GMT
Subject: Re: Decompressing a tree to a location other than the working directory
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=iApfmo3HhDU9BgxvJuHJwuDc=nHFpOib9TM8x@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100806184345.GB2985@burratino>

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 13:43, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
>> git checkout allows one to checkout a particular version of a certain
>> path in the working directory.  Are there accessible plumbing commands
>> that can be used to accomplish the same thing, but change the target
>> directory.
>
> I don’t know if it is plumbing, but "git archive" is very useful for
> that.
>
>  $ git archive HEAD^:Documentation | (cd elsewhere && tar xf -)

For single files (rather than directories), you could do this:

  git show HEAD^:path/to/file > /some/path/file