How to checkout a single file in GIT

Question

We have developed an auto deployment tool for deploying files(ear,war and jar) in jboss server. Developers will check-in files in Visual Source safe. The auto deployment tool automatically checkouts latest files one by one specified by developer and deploys it in jboss server by using API. Now we are moving to GIT to maintain our source and other deployment files.

Does git have an option to check a single file and paths like VSS?

Answer 1

You can use this

git checkout <branch-where-the-file-is> -- path/to/file/in/the/other/branch

This will retrieve the file from the other branch, to current

Answer 2

You can retrieve a specific file from a Git repository. Something like:

git show HEAD:filename.txt

If your repository is in another directory, you can use GIT_DIR:

env GIT_DIR=/path/to/git/repo.git git show HEAD:filename.txt >filename.txt

I've shown redirecting the output to a file.