Decompressing a tree to a location other than the working directory

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. For example, if I wanted to checkout a certain path, but wanted to check it out somewhere external to my working directory / repository?

Thanks,

Josh

Joshua Shrader wrote:

I don’t know if it is plumbing, but "git archive" is very useful for that.

 $ git archive HEAD^:Documentation | (cd elsewhere && tar xf -)

Hope that helps, Jonathan

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 13:43, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

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

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

Joshua Shrader <jshrader83@gmail.com> writes:

Porcelain way: check out first example in git-archive(1) manpage

  EXAMPLES
  ========

  git archive --format=tar --prefix=junk/ HEAD | (cd /var/tmp/ && tar xf -)

       Create a tar archive that contains the contents of the latest commit
       on the current branch, and extract it in the /var/tmp/junk directory.

Plumbing way: after preparing index (it can be separate file than .git/index), use "git checkout-index" as desceived in second example on manpage:

  EXAMPLES
  ========

  Using `git checkout-index` to "export an entire tree"

        The  prefix  ability  basically  makes  it trivial to use git check-
        out-index as an "export as tree" function.  Just  read  the  desired
        tree into the index, and do:

          $ git checkout-index --prefix=git-export-dir/ -a

        `git checkout-index` will "export" the index into the specified direc-
        tory.

        The final "/" is important. The exported name is literally just pre-
        fixed  with  the  specified string