It seems like ! patterns in the sparse-checkout file don't exclude individual files in a directory. Here's what I did: git init mkdir test1 echo "test1" test1/file1.txt echo "test2" test1/file2.txt echo "test3" test1/file3.txt mkdir test2 echo "test2" test2/file1.txt echo "test2" test2/file2.txt echo "test2" test2/file3.txt git add . git commit -m "test" git config core.sparseCheckout true echo 'test1/' > .git/info/sparse-checkout echo '!test1/file2.txt' >> .git/info/sparse-checkout git checkout master -- The end result is like this: test1 test1/file1.txt test1/file2.txt test1/file3.txt The "test1" directory was included, but "test1/file2.txt" wasn't excluded even though I added a ! pattern for it. The test2 directory was correctly excluded so that makes me think sparse was working in general, but just not respecting the ! pattern in this case. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong? -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html