What is the most efficient mechanism (in respect to data transferred and disk space used) to get the contents of a single file from a remote git repository?
So far I've managed to come up with:
git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 [email protected]:foo/bar.git && cd bar && git show HEAD:path/to/file.txt
This still seems overkill.
What about getting multiple files from the repo?
If there is web interface deployed (like gitweb, cgit, Gitorious, ginatra), you can use it to download single file ('raw' or 'plain' view).
If other side enabled it, you can use git archive's '--remote=<URL>' option (and possibly limit it to a directory given file resides in), for example:
$ git archive [email protected]:foo/bar.git --prefix=path/to/ HEAD:path/to/ | tar xvf -