git - Retrieve a single file from a repository

Question

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?

Answer 1

in git version 1.7.9.5 this seems to work to export a single file from a remote

git archive --remote=ssh://host/pathto/repo.git HEAD README.md

This will cat the contents of the file README.md.