Re: Feature request: Allow extracting revisions into directories

[Michael J Gruber <git@drmicha.warpmail.net>]

Robert Clausecker venit, vidit, dixit 03.02.2013 15:18:
> Hello!
> 
> git currently has the archive command that allows to save an arbitrary
> revision into a tar or zip file. Sometimes it is useful to not save this
> revision into an archive but to directly put all files into an arbitrary
> directory. Currently this seems to be not possible to archive directly;
> the only way I found to do it is to run git archive and then directly
> unpack the archive into a directory.
> 
>     git --git-dir REPO archive REVISION | tar x
> 
> It would be nice to have a command or simply a switch to git archive
> that allows the user to put the files of REVISION into a directory
> instead of making an archive.
> 
> Thank you very much for your help. Yours,
> 
> Robert Clausecker

Sitaram has said much about the Unix philosophy already, and Konstantin
gave a variant of checkout. Just two more cents:

How would you copy a directory tree? I presume you wouldn't use "tar c .
| tar -xC gothere", but what would be your worklflow?

Depending on what you actually want to achieve, "git clone -b branch"
and removing the superfluous .git-dir might be a viable option. (Beware
the hardlinks, though.)

Michael