How to retrieve a single file from a specific revision in Git?
Using git show
To complete your own answer, the syntax is indeed
git show object
git show $REV:$FILE
git show somebranch:from/the/root/myfile.txt
git show HEAD^^^:test/test.py
The command takes the usual style of revision, meaning you can use any of the following:
- branch name (as suggested by ash)
HEAD
+ x number of^
characters- The SHA1 hash of a given revision
- The first few (maybe 5) characters of a given SHA1 hash
Tip It's important to remember that when using "git show
", always specify a path from the root of the repository, not your current directory position.
(Although Mike Morearty mentions that, at least with git 1.7.5.4, you can specify a relative path by putting "./
" at the beginning of the path. For example:
git show HEAD^^:./test.py
)
Using git restore
With Git 2.23+ (August 2019), you can also use git restore
which replaces the confusing git checkout
command
git restore -s <SHA1> -- afile
git restore -s somebranch -- afile
That would restore on the working tree only the file as present in the "source" (-s
) commit SHA1 or branch somebranch
.
To restore also the index:
git restore -s <SHA1> -SW -- afile
(-SW
: short for --staged --worktree
)
As noted in the comments by starwarswii
It lets you pipe the contents into a file, which is great if you want to just quickly compare files from a commit.
E.g. you can do:
git show 1234:path/to/file.txt > new.txt git show 1234~:path/to/file.txt > old.txt
then compare them.
Using low-level git plumbing commands
Before git1.5.x, this was done with some plumbing:
git ls-tree <rev>
show a list of one or more 'blob' objects within a commit
git cat-file blob <file-SHA1>
cat a file as it has been committed within a specific revision (similar to svn
cat).
use git ls-tree
to retrieve the value of a given file-sha1
git cat-file -p $(git-ls-tree $REV $file | cut -d " " -f 3 | cut -f 1)::
git-ls-tree
lists the object ID for $file
in revision $REV
, this is cut out of the output and used as an argument to git-cat-file
, which should really be called git-cat-object
, and simply dumps that object to stdout
.
Note: since Git 2.11 (Q4 2016), you can apply a content filter to the git cat-file
output.
See
commit 3214594,
commit 7bcf341 (09 Sep 2016),
commit 7bcf341 (09 Sep 2016), and
commit b9e62f6,
commit 16dcc29 (24 Aug 2016) by Johannes Schindelin (dscho
).
(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster
-- in commit 7889ed2, 21 Sep 2016)
git config diff.txt.textconv "tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m <"
git cat-file --textconv --batch
Note: "git cat-file --textconv
" started segfaulting recently (2017), which has been corrected in Git 2.15 (Q4 2017)
See commit cc0ea7c (21 Sep 2017) by Jeff King (peff
).
(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster
-- in commit bfbc2fc, 28 Sep 2017)
If you wish to replace/overwrite the content of a file in your current branch with the content of the file from a previous commit or a different branch, you can do so with these commands:
git checkout 08618129e66127921fbfcbc205a06153c92622fe path/to/file.txt
or
git checkout mybranchname path/to/file.txt
You will then have to commit those changes in order for them to be effective in the current branch.