Somewhat in the same space, I saw an interesting stackoverflow post[1] about how to generically retrieve a single file from git. Apparently since git version 1.7.9.5, you can do this:
git archive --remote=ssh://host/pathto/repo.git HEAD README.md | tar xO
Though apparently support depends on how you're running git, and potentially some enabled server side options.
The other comment above would probably also need to transmit a few more objects. At least if you are starting from a commit hash (instead of HEAD) and don't trust the server.
(I would assume git doesn't trust the server, and will verify that the chain of hashes works out.)
He's effectively writing a minimal git client in Python.
"Fun" is a good reason for this sort or exploration, but it also has its practical uses. For instance, I use `isomorphic-git` (a git client written in JavaScript) to include a comment with the relevant commit hash in my bundled JavaScript. I can run it on any machine with Node, without opening a shell or trying to find where/if git is installed locally.
As a side note, this is why I love hacker news. Just in the last two days I’ve come across a couple posts like this (this one outlining some git internals, another explaining a language server, etc)
Blog posts are becoming my favourite form of knowledge transfer
I’ve been meaning to start one myself and posts like this are making me move it up my todo list
If this post interests you, James Coglan’s Building Git is an extremely thorough book-length treatment of the same concept. Highly recommended for learning git internals in depth.
One could use `printf 'first\0second'` in the Bash shell as an example of making a "string" with null embedded into it, but you can't store that in a Bash variable.
Shells and their aversion to null characters was my first introduction to Perl way back when. Tcl, at the time, couldn't handle null characters either. Various Awk implementations had different issues with them. Python didn't yet exist, C was too tedious for many things.
One option with shells is some set/get functions that encode/decode to base64, hex, etc. Feels pretty clunky though.
I am sure you know this, so I'm just being pedantic here, but it's not that really the shells that have an aversion to the null character so much as that the exec() system call and the main() convention require C strings for program names, program arguments and environment variables, and since shells are thin layers above exec() and the environment, shells kinda have to also use C strings. Sure, nothing stops a shell from using counted byte strings and then allowing nulls in non-exported variable values, but because they evolved in a system that was so deeply based on C and C strings... they don't.
You don't actually need to store it in a variable. Do it the bash way and write it to a temporary file. You can then get the sha1 of that file and then zlib compress and copy it to the appropriate dir and filename.
Readit News
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1125476/retrieve-a-singl...
git clone --filter=tree:0 --depth=1 --sparse --no-checkout && git checkout HEAD <desired_file>
(But that would still end up fetching a few more objects than just the desired file.)
(I would assume git doesn't trust the server, and will verify that the chain of hashes works out.)
"Fun" is a good reason for this sort or exploration, but it also has its practical uses. For instance, I use `isomorphic-git` (a git client written in JavaScript) to include a comment with the relevant commit hash in my bundled JavaScript. I can run it on any machine with Node, without opening a shell or trying to find where/if git is installed locally.
Blog posts are becoming my favourite form of knowledge transfer
I’ve been meaning to start one myself and posts like this are making me move it up my todo list
https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/
A few months ago I figured out how to modify remote refs in a similar fashion although I wrote it in go. https://stackoverflow.com/a/77210784/308851
One option with shells is some set/get functions that encode/decode to base64, hex, etc. Feels pretty clunky though.
[0]: https://www.leshenko.net/p/ugit/