When we clone/ pull with : config core.sparsecheckout true We can specify paths to include. Would be good to explicitly specify paths to exclude too. So I can include want/ but exclude want/bin/ Similar to .git/info/sparse-checkout can we have a .git/info/sparse-ignore-checkout optional file? Logic would be to see if a path matches that is in .git/info/sparse-checkout then see if its flagged in .git/info/sparse-ignore-checkout , do not download if blocked in .git/info/sparse-ignore-checkout. If the file does not exist, then nothing ignored. Regards, Tushar Kapila