Back

Explore Courses Blog Tutorials Interview Questions
0 votes
2 views
in DevOps and Agile by (19.4k points)

I have a Git repository and I'd like to see how some file looked a few months ago. I found the revision at that date, and it's 27cf8e84bb88e24ae4b4b3df2b77aab91a3735d8. I need to see what did one file look like and also save that to a file.

I managed to see the file using gitk, but it doesn't have an option to save it. I tried with command-line tools, the closest I got was:

git-show 27cf8e84bb88e24ae4b4b3df2b77aab91a3735d8 my_file.txt

However, this command shows a diff and not the file contents. I know I can later use something like PAGER=cat and redirect output to a file, but I don't know how to get to the actual file content.

Basically, I'm looking for something like svn cat.

1 Answer

0 votes
by (27.5k points)

To replace or overwrite the content of a file in your current branch with the content of the file from a previous commit or a different branch, you can do so with these commands:

$ git checkout <commit-id-of-previous-commit> path/to/file.txt

or

$ git checkout <branchname> path/to/file.txt

For these changes to be effective in the current branch, you will then have to commit those changes.

Welcome to Intellipaat Community. Get your technical queries answered by top developers!

30.5k questions

32.5k answers

500 comments

108k users

Browse Categories

...