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I read that it's possible to retrieve a single file from a specific revision in Git, as answered in this SO question:
How to retrieve a single file from specific revision in Git?

So I want to know if it's safe to do that with binary files. I have some binary files in use and I don't want to check them out, really what I want to do is copy them out from a specific revision. I tried this:

git show HEAD~1:database.db > copy-of-database-from-mmddyy.db

That seems to work, as in the output is an exact match of database.db for that commit. But I have to wonder is this an allowed use of git show? Does it support what I'm doing and will the result always be correct and not corrupt (ie autocrlf translation for example.. I'm in Windows msysgit). Thanks!

Community
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user2672807
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1 Answers1

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Yep, perfectly safe. From git help show:

For plain blobs, it shows the plain contents[ ... t]he contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level.

And testing says the same thing: no attributes are applied.

jthill
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    Thanks I'm going to mark this as correct. Can you prepend a "Yes, it's fine" or something similar to your answer? I had to interpret it when I read it. If anyone stumbles on this question they'll probably want a simple Yes/No in addition to an explanation. – user2672807 Oct 14 '13 at 23:15