git lfs pull a single file

[mmahalwy]

Is there a way to only pull a single file?

[ttaylorr]

Hi @mmahalwy! You can specify the --include or -I flag (they are aliases of each other) to only include a specific filename in your pull.

For example, if you only wanted to pull the file called "a.dat", try:

$ git lfs pull --include "a.dat"

Or, if you only wanted to pull files matching the ".dat" extension, try:

$ git lfs pull --include "*.dat"

When given either the --include or --exclude, LFS will only pull files that are explicitly included and not excluded. For more information on these filters, you can check out our documentation here. 😄

Let me know if you have any questions in the future!

[mmahalwy]

@ttaylorr thank you for that awesome answer!

One last thing, does that include directories? For example, I have name a.dat that is inside directory first/ and second/. I want to only pull first/a.dat.

Thoughts?

[ttaylorr]

Yep, just pass -I first/a.dat. a.dat alone will matcher neither first/a.dat or second/a.dat, since it pattern matches the whole path, not just the base 😄

[mmahalwy]

sweet! TY!

[ttaylorr]

You're welcome! Feel free to comment here again if you have any more questions 😄

[wutiejun]

I can use git lfs pull -I "*a.dat", but git lfs pull -I "a.dat" is useless. Why?

[ttaylorr]

@wutiejun we have a test-case that is passing that illustrates this behavior working correctly here.

If you're having trouble, feel free to open a new issue with further details.

[zezba9000]

How do you do this without a remote? Local repo only?

This doesn't work:

git lfs checkout --include "image.bmp" > image.bmp.orig

[apm963]

@zezba9000 I could not find a native command (ala show) that returns the contents of an LFS object. Instead, I was able to get the file by building a script that performed the following steps:

• Get output of git show branch:path/to/file. Ex:

  version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1
  oid sha256:7de96d152019316b4b1d6c89979292fa5c4034c9f28bb3e3304717314ddea594
  size 279
  

• Parse the output to get the hash after sha256. To do this I split the output into lines, then performed a regex match on the second line for something like /^oid \w+:([a-fA-F0-9]+)$/
• Parse the hash for the following pieces
  • Chars in position 0, 1 (eg. 7d)
  • Chars in position 2, 3 (eg. e9)
  • The full hash
• Using those facets, I attempt to get the file from the following path (relative to the repo root): .git/lfs/objects/${firstHexPair}/${secondHexPair}/${fullHash}

That worked well for me. You'll, of course, need to make sure that the LFS objects exist in your local repository.

[WilliamTambellini]

@apm963 thank you.
Still, is it really the only way to extract the real file from a git lfs pointer file : should nt git lfs CLI provide a simple way to extract the file to a specified location ?

[bk2204]

You don't actually need a Git LFS-specific way to extract a file. You can use Git to do it yourself by using git cat-file --filters, like so:

$ git cat-file --filters HEAD:test1.bin

[LeungMaggie]

git fetch
git checkout origin/branchxx path/to/file