Please note that this answer does download a complete copy of the data from a repository. The git remote add -f command will clone the whole repository. From the man page of git-remote: With -f option, git fetch <name> is run immediately after the remote information is set up. Try this: mkdir myrepo cd myrepo … Read more
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 | tar xO This will cat the contents of the file README.md.
Originally, I mentioned in 2012 git archive (see Jared Forsyth’s answer and Robert Knight’s answer), since git1.7.9.5 (March 2012), Paul Brannan’s answer: git archive –format=tar –remote=origin HEAD:path/to/directory — filename | tar -O -xf – But: in 2013, that was no longer possible for remote https://github.com URLs. See the old page “Can I archive a repository?” … Read more
What you are trying to do is called a sparse checkout, and that feature was added in Git 1.7.0 (Feb. 2012). The steps to do a sparse clone are as follows: mkdir <repo> cd <repo> git init git remote add -f origin <url> This creates an empty repository with your remote, and fetches all objects … Read more