Sparse checkout in Git 1.7.0?

Question

With the new sparse checkout feature in Git 1.7.0, is it possible to just get the contents of a subdirectory like how you can in SVN? I found this example, but it preserves the full directory structure. Imagine that I just wanted the contents of the 'perl' directory, without an actual directory named 'perl'.

-- EDIT --

Example:

My git repository contains the following paths

repo/.git/
repo/perl/
repo/perl/script1.pl
repo/perl/script2.pl
repo/images/
repo/images/image1.jpg
repo/images/image2.jpg
repo/doc/
repo/doc/readme.txt
repo/doc/help.txt

What I want is to be able to produce from the above repository this layout:

repo/.git/
repo/script1.pl
repo/script2.pl

However with the current sparse checkout feature, it seems like it is only possible to get

repo/.git/
repo/perl/script1.pl
repo/perl/script2.pl

which is NOT what I want.

Answer 1

You still need to clone the whole repository, which will have all the files. You could use the --depth flag to only retrieve a limited amount of history.

Once the repository is cloned, the read-tree trick limits your "view" of the repository to only those files or directories that are in the .git/info/sparse-checkout file.

I wrote a quick script to help manage the sparseness, since at the moment it is a bit unfriendly:

#!/bin/sh
echo > .git/info/sparse-checkout
for i in "$@"
do
    echo "$i" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
done
git read-tree -m -u HEAD

If you save this script as git-sparse.sh into the path reported by calling git --exec-path, then you can run git sparse foo/ bar/ to only "checkout" the foo and bar directories, or git sparse '*' to get everything back again.