Equivalent in git of "hg cat" or "svn cat"

I want to extract a copy of the latest version of a file held in a git repository, and pass it into a script for some processing. With svn or hg, I just use the "cat" command:

Print the specified files as they were at the given revision. If no revision is given, the parent of the working directory is used, or tip if no revision is checked out.

(that's from the description of hg cat in the hg documentation)

What's the equivalent command to do this with git?

git show rev:path/to/file

Where rev is the revision.

See http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html for a comparison of git and svn commands.

there is "git cat-file" which you can run like this:

$ git cat-file blob v1.0:path/to/file

where you can replace 'v1.0' with the branch, tag or commit SHA you want and then 'path/to/file' with the relative path in repository. You can also pass '-s' to see the size of the content if you want.

might be closer to the 'cat' commands you are used to, though the previously mentioned 'show' will do much the same thing.

git show is the command you are looking for. From the documentation:

   git show next~10:Documentation/README
          Shows the contents of the file Documentation/README as they were
          current in the 10th last commit of the branch next.

Also work with branch names (like HEAD in the 1st p) :

git show $branch:$filename