If you go to the page and view the links provided by "raw" (in the top left corner, when viewing the file). You will see, that you can access it by:

https://github.com/username/repository/raw/$changeset_hash/path/to/file

Instead of $changeset_hash you can also provide a branch (e.g. master) or tag.

You can retrieve the raw file using something like wget.

Accessing a single file directly from a .git-repository is not possible (as far as I know), because of how the data is stored.

edit: When you want to access a file from a private repo, you first have to create an access token with the appropriate permissions in your account settings. Instead of calling the url above you can then use github's API to access the content of a file. Be sure to use the Accept-header for custom media types to get the raw data. This might look something like this:

curl \
  -H 'Authorization: token $YOUR_TOKEN' \
  -H 'Accept: application/vnd.github.v3.raw' \
  -O \
  -L 'https://api.github.com/repos/:owner/:repo/contents/:path'

The -O will save the contents in a local file with the same name as the remote file name. For easier use you can wrap it in a script. @Chris_Withers suggested an edit with a nice python snippet that unfortunately got rejected as to big of a change to the answer.

This will clone the files into new directory it creates:

git clone [email protected]:whatever NonExistentNewFolderName

From the comments I saw you actually speak about GitHub.

It won't work like this because:

Downloading a project on GitHub causes the GitHub server to first pack your project as zip and than forwarding you to a temporary link where you get your zip ..

this link will only work for a certain time and than GitHub will delete your zip file from their servers..

So what you get with wget is just the html page which would forward you as soon as your zip file is generated.

As suggested use

git clone http://github.com/<yourRepoLink> <optional local path where to store>

to download the git repo ... If for some reason (e.g. for transfer it to others) you need it explicitly as zip you still could pack it after cloning is finished..

first of all you need a API access token from github how to create it:

1. go to github.com and click on your profile picture at top right
2. scroll down and click settings on the side bar which is shown
3. scroll down and click on developer settings on left sidebar
4. click on Personal Access Token(menu bar)
5. click on tokens(classic)
6. then click on Generate New Token(menu bar)
7. then click on generate new token(classic)
8. write the information of the token(name, expires date) and be careful! allow all of the access which is shown on the page! if you don't the API shouldn't work
9. copy your API key
10. write this code with the token you got copy

import requests
from requests.structures import CaseInsensitiveDict
GH_PREFIX = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com"
ORG = "GITHUB_USERNAME"
REPO = "YOUR_REPOSITORY_NAME"
BRANCH = "YOUR_REPOSITORY_BRANCH"
FOLDER = "THE_FOLDER_WHICH_INCLUDE_TEST.txt"
FILE = "THE_FILE_YOU_WANT_TO_ACCESS(TEST.txt)"
url = GH_PREFIX + "/" + ORG + "/" + REPO + "/" + BRANCH + "/" + FOLDER + "/" + FILE
headers = CaseInsensitiveDict()
headers["Authorization"] = "token " + "YOUR_API_ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE"
r = requests.get(url, headers=headers, stream=True) 
first = str(r.content).replace("b'", "")
second = first.replace("\\r", "")
third = second.replace("\\n'", "")
result = third.replace("'", "")
print(result)

i hope this helps you

An alternative I discovered recently, using PowerShell:

$client = new-object System.Net.WebClient
$client.DownloadFile("http://www.xyz.net/file.txt","C:\tmp\file.txt")

It works as well with GET queries.

If you need to specify credentials to download the file, add the following line in between:

$client.Credentials =  Get-Credential                

A standard windows credentials prompt will pop up. The credentials you enter there will be used to download the file. You only need to do this once for all the time you will be using the $client object.