Feels almost silly to write this one out, but hey, it was a note I took and I figure writing it out helps me remember. I wanted to have all the files of a certain Git revision (think a specific commit, a branch, or a tag) available in a different folder. I could not be bothered with various stashing, checking out, and the like. In comes git archive.

git archive SOMEREVISION | tar -x -C /some/target/folder
  • git archive takes a revision and outputs a tarball to STDOUT
  • pipe it to tar
  • tar -x extracts
  • -C folder changes into that folder before extracting