Why it exists

Git, it seems, has nothing like svn cat. Svn cat is a great tool that displays a file as it existed in a particular revision of the source tree.

I needed to see a previous version of a file, because git diff wouldn't have provided enough context, so I needed this tool.

Installation

It's probably easiest to clone this repository somewhere then create a symlink on your path with the proper naming convention.

$ git clone https://github.com/rwilcox/git-cat.git
$ ln -s `pwd`/git-cat/git-cat ~/bin/git-cat

Assuming of course that you have ~/bin/ in your $PATH this will allow a workflow like:

$ git cat README.markdown 1cba2d72 

I suggest a symlink under the assumption that you have ~/bin under some kind of version control already, and/or don't want to put the git-cat repository directly on your $PATH.

On the shoulders of giants

Before I built this tool I did some Google searching. Some of this searching found good information, some found... stuff that didn't work.

• http://buildmonkey.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/git-cat-contd/
  Got me 25% of the way there. But, of course, I wanted to be able to specify arbitrary commits too

• http://book.git-scm.com/3_reviewing_history_-_git_log.html
  Made me realize that what I wanted to do wasn't built into git

• http://www.gitready.com/advanced/2009/01/20/bend-logs-to-your-will.html
  Useful information on git log, although I didn't end up using much of this info

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/610208/how-to-retrieve-a-single-file-from-specific-revision-in-git
  Seems to solve the problem, but gives me an odd error I couldn't figure out how to fix on Git 1.6.2. Stupid git.

TODO

If you want to help here are some things I'd like to do but lack time:

1. Extract help documentation from the git-cat file and make it something that can be translated into a manpage.
2. Installation script to install a git-cat symbolic link to somewhere nice on $PATH, and also install said manpage.

Authors

• Ryan Wilcox, Wilcox Development Solutions. http://www.wilcoxd.com