Recovering Folder from Git Restored Repo

Dennis Putnam· Aug 1, 2016, 20:58 UTC · lore

I am in a bit of a pickle. I deleted a remote repo that had a folder that I belatedly realized I need. The deleted repo exists on a backup which I restored. How do I extract the needed folder from that restored repo. Not being a git expert I'm not sure what to do but I cannot find any recognizable sources. This is an 'ls' of the restored repo:

branches  config  description  HEAD  hooks  info  objects  ref

TIA.

Jeff King· Aug 1, 2016, 21:18 UTC · re: Dennis Putnam · lore

Re: Recovering Folder from Git Restored Repo

On Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 04:58:47PM -0400, Dennis Putnam wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> I am in a bit of a pickle. I deleted a remote repo that had a folder
> that I belatedly realized I need. The deleted repo exists on a backup
> which I restored. How do I extract the needed folder from that restored
> repo. Not being a git expert I'm not sure what to do but I cannot find
> any recognizable sources. This is an 'ls' of the restored repo:
> 
> branches  config  description  HEAD  hooks  info  objects  ref

That's a "bare" repository, which has no matching working tree, just the git data. The simplest thing may be to just clone it; the clone will have a working tree:

  git clone /path/to/restored-repo tmp
  cd tmp

and then you can pick out whatever files you like.

You can also extract the data straight from the bare repository. Try "git ls-tree -r HEAD" to see the complete listing of files (replace HEAD with the name of a specific branch if it was there). You can extract individual files with "git show HEAD:path/to/file". Or you can generate a tar or zip archive of a subtree like:

  git archive --format=zip HEAD:my-subdir >foo.zip

-Peff