Get the tarballs!
Even though Github doesn't expose this in the site (apparently they did ages ago), they provide tar.gz files of the repositories.
wget -qO - https://github.com/<user>/repo>/archive/master.tar.gz | tar zx --strip-components=1 <repo>-master/<filename>
<user>, <repo>, <filename> are what you'd expect them to be. --strip-components is use to prevent tar from creating a directory named after the repo.
Therefore:
$ wget -O - https://github.com/au-answers/dupe-check/archive/master.tar.gz | tar zx --strip-components=1 dupe-check-master/dupe-check
--2016-04-25 08:28:50-- https://github.com/au-answers/dupe-check/archive/master.tar.gz
Resolving github.com (github.com)... 192.30.252.128
Connecting to github.com (github.com)|192.30.252.128|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: https://codeload.github.com/au-answers/dupe-check/tar.gz/master [following]
--2016-04-25 08:28:51-- https://codeload.github.com/au-answers/dupe-check/tar.gz/master
Resolving codeload.github.com (codeload.github.com)... 192.30.252.160
Connecting to codeload.github.com (codeload.github.com)|192.30.252.160|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2470 (2.4K) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: ‘STDOUT’
- 100%[========================================================================================================================================>] 2.41K --.-KB/s in 0s
2016-04-25 08:28:52 (21.5 MB/s) - written to stdout [2470/2470]
$ ll dupe-check
-rwxr-xr-x 1 muru muru 7.5K Mar 5 21:46 dupe-check
I'm not convinced this is a particularly friendly way. An additional chmod +x is IMO infinitely preferable.
Failed attempts
Get the zips!
You can process substitution on zsh to extract the zips linked on the Github repo page. Github, thankfully, adds extra metadata to zips so that permissions are preserved. unzip on Ubuntu is able to use that to restore permissions. So:
unzip -j =(wget -O - https://github.com/au-answers/dupe-check/archive/master.zip) dupe-check-master/dupe-check
Unfortunately, =() is a zsh thing. It creates a proper file instead of a FIFO. Bash doesn't have an equivalent. <() is always FIFO.
Git single files
You can get a single file from repo using git. However, Github doesn't support this.
Read man git to learn how to clone (get a copy of) the repository, then cd to the directory with the files.
Read the README.md file, and because there is a Makefile I would, after reading Makefile, type make, as advised by README.md.
Best Answer
That Git repository contains an
INSTALLfile, which is a common place for building and installation instructions. It reads:In
doc/readme-qt.rstwe can find installation instructions “for Debian and Ubuntu”:You can also find a description of some useful build options in that file.