How to view git objects and index without using git

Question

Using the OS X terminal,

How an you view the contents of these files as plain text?

Answer 1

I'm going to interpret your question in a different way. If you want to understand what the objects files ARE, you can use git to view them directly, without navigating the history log or using git checkout, diff etc. For instance:

For the file .git/objects/04/a42e9a7282340ef0256eaa6d59254227b8b141

Run the command

git show 04a42e

which combines the 04 from /04/ and the first four characters of the remaining number a42e.

> git show 04a42e
commit 04f7db976fa54c72fcc6350dd7d0aa06cb249df6
Author: Alex Brown 
Date:   Fri Jan 8 11:02:21 2010 +0000
a text file

diff --git a/1.txt b/1.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..04a42e9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+Woo
+# boo
+# choo

This one is a commit, other objects may be file blobs, trees, etc.