git show remote repository (display the contents of a single file)

Question

Is there any way to get the contents of a single file from a remote git repository? "git archive" looks promising, except that GitHub has it explicitly disabled.

The following StackOverflow question generally had the right idea: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1125476/git-retrieve-a-single-file-from-a-repository

In our situation, we're basically looking to do a "git show " except that we'd like to perform that against git://github.com/SomeUser/SomeRepository.

Right now we have a script that simply clones the repository locally and executes "git show" which does the job. We're looking for a way around the clone. Simplicity is ideal in this situation rather than availability of the remote repository.

Answer 1

What about parsing the github url? It looks like you can get the raw contents of a file (using curl, wget etc...) via something like:

http://github.com/SomeUser/SomeRepository/raw/CommitId/Path/To/File