document updated 12 years ago, on Sep 24, 2012

Information about exploring Git's internal files:

objects/ directory

If you run:

$ cd .git/
$ ls -1 objects/*/*
objects/84/aff3f08e6bf234b05d2ca172e77195d97356b7
objects/c0/2e8f624670a3cc7c51648a97cea14060e4e9b2
objects/3f/9b27fe0e33326e0cedca7472a9d55855a747bc
objects/7c/145d80afa7c0bb2c57f48592c800b9053f89c4
objects/ae/51c47cbde8cd24dcbf5ccbeb027eaa5300b390
objects/d6/ed875487d51b8b22354ef001f0e8d7b41b5056

You can look at the contents of any of these files:

combine the first two letters with the other 38 letters
run git cat-file -p and give it that SHA1 string, and you'll see the contents of the file

These files are different types. You can see their types by doing this:

ls -1 objects/*/* | sed 's/^objects\/\|\///g' | git cat-file --batch-check

ls -1 objects/*/* | sed 's/^objects\/\|\///g' | git cat-file --batch-check | perl -nale 'print "$_\n"; system qq{git cat-file -p $F[0] | sed "s/^/\t/"} if $F[1] ne "blob"; print ""'

The last column is the size of the object.

Object types:

commit — information about who/when the comit was made; contains a pointer to the tree
tree — a list of the files that were part of one commit
blob — the contents of a file

change	`84/aff3f08e6bf234b05d2ca172e77195d97356b7`
to	`84aff3f08e6bf234b05d2ca172e77195d97356b7`