View a file in a different Git branch without changing branches

Question

Is it possible to open a file in a git branch without checking out that branch? How?

Essentially I want to be able to open a file in my github pages branch without switching branches all the time. I don't want to modify it, just want to view it.

Answer 1

This should work:

git show branch:file

Where branch can be any ref (branch, tag, HEAD, ...) and file is the full path of the file. To export it you could use

git show branch:file > exported_file

You should also look at VonC's answers to some related questions:

• How to retrieve a single file from specific revision in Git?
• How to get just one file from another branch

UPDATE 2015-01-19:

Nowadays you can use relative paths with git show a1b35:./file.txt.

Answer 2

git show somebranch:path/to/your/file

you can also do multiple files and have them concatenated:

git show branchA~10:fileA branchB^^:fileB

You have to provide the full path to the file.

If you want to get the file in the local directory (revert just one file) you can checkout:

git checkout somebranch^^^ -- path/to/file

Answer 3

A simple, newbie friendly way for looking into a file: git gui browser <branch> which lets you explore the contents of any file.

It's also there in the File menu of git gui. Most other -more advanced- GUI wrappers (Qgit, Egit, etc..) offer browsing/opening files as well.

Answer 4

If you're using Emacs, you can type C-x v ~ to see a different revision of the file you're currently editing (tags, branches and hashes all work).

Answer 5

Add the following to your ~/.gitconfig file

[alias]
  cat = "!git show \"$1:$2\" #"

And then try this

git cat BRANCHNAME FILEPATH

Personally I prefer separate parameters without a colon. Why? This choice mirrors the parameters of the checkout command, which I tend to use rather frequently and I find it thus much easier to remember than the bizarro colon-separated parameter of the show command.