Re: verifying git file contents without checking out history?

Marc Weber [off-list ref] writes:

git clone --depth=20 $url; git checkout $hash

How to verify that I have the contents I think I have - given that I
trust my local git executable?

Define what you mean by "contents".  Do you care only about the tree
state recorded in that $hash, and you also trust that $hash is the
correct one?

  $ git cat-object commit $hash | git hash-object --stdin -t commit

would be a way to verify that you do have the commit object
everybody else calls $hash, and you can verify the objects contained
within the commit whose name is $hash (i.e. its tree and its
parents) in a similar way.  Use "git ls-tree $tree" to find out the
objects your top-level tree recorded in the commit $hash, and you
can verify the contents recorded in the tree object recursively.