GIT: Checkout to a specific folder

Another solution which is a bit cleaner - just specify a different work tree.

To checkout everything from your HEAD (not index) to a specific out directory:

git --work-tree=/path/to/outputdir checkout HEAD -- .

To checkout a subdirectory or file from your HEAD to a specific directory:

git --work-tree=/path/to/outputdir checkout HEAD -- subdirname

As per Do a "git export" (like "svn export")?

You can use git checkout-index for that, this is a low level command, if you want to export everything, you can use -a,

git checkout-index -a -f --prefix=/destination/path/

To quote the man pages:

The final "/" [on the prefix] is important. The exported name is literally just prefixed with the specified string.

If you want to export a certain directory, there are some tricks involved. The command only takes files, not directories. To apply it to directories, use the 'find' command and pipe the output to git.

find dirname -print0 | git checkout-index --prefix=/path-to/dest/ -f -z --stdin

Also from the man pages:

Intuitiveness is not the goal here. Repeatability is.

If you're working under your feature and don't want to checkout back to master, you can run:

cd ./myrepo

git worktree add ../myrepo_master master

git worktree remove ../myrepo_master

It will create ../myrepo_master directory with master branch commits, where you can continue work

For a single file:

git show HEAD:abspath/to/file > file.copy