How to sparsely checkout only one single file from a git repository?

Question

How do I checkout just one file from a git repo?

Answer 1

First clone the repo with the -n option, which suppresses the default checkout of all files, and the --depth 1 option, which means it only gets the most recent revision of each file

git clone -n git://path/to/the_repo.git --depth 1

Then check out just the file you want like so:

cd the_repo
git checkout HEAD name_of_file