Re: Decompressing a tree to a location other than the working directory

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 13:43, Jonathan Nieder [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

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