version control - 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.