Thanks Duy for the fast response. > Anyway there is a trailing space at the >> end of the rule. This is the content of your sparse checkout file in C >> syntax >> >> "/CONFIGURATION\x20\r\n" >> >> Maybe we could warn about trailing spaces.. Stripping them >> automatically is a possibility, but we need an escape hatch for >> (crazy?) people who actually have trailing spaces in there paths. Yuk eh? I just discovered that if you do echo /CONFIGURATION > .git\info\sparse-checkout in Windows, you get 5 training spaces! Man, I hate Windows! Something that would help is an easier way to debug sparse-checkout rules. When something goes wrong, there appears to be no way to understand what git thinks it's reading. I'm not sure if such a way, if it existed, would help with trailing spaces, but if you could say git read-tree -muv HEAD and it would say reading '.git\info\sparse-checkout'... rule '/CONFIGURATION ' - no matches that would solve actually two problems: 1) You can see that it thinks there is a space there 2) the config file name is sparse-checkout, with a dash, not sparsecheckout... a mistake I made that had me scratching my head for some time, since everywhere else it doesn't have a dash! Thanks again for your quick help. Martin -- 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