git: avoid Perl5 internal scratchpad target cache

git: avoid Perl5 internal scratchpad target cache

Creating a scalar ref directly off substr() seemed to be causing
the underlying non-ref scalar to end up in Perl's scratchpad.
Assign the substr result to a local variable seems sufficient to
prevent multi-megabyte SVs from lingering indefinitely when a
read-only daemon serves rare, oversized blobs.