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 do not have to provide the full path to the file, relative paths are acceptable e.g.:

git show branchA~10:../src/hello.c 

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

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