How do I clone, fetch or sparse checkout a single directory or a list of directories from git repository?

This bash function below does the trick.

function git_sparse_checkout {    # git repository, e.g.: http://github.com/frgomes/bash-scripts    local url=$1    # directory where the repository will be downloaded, e.g.: ./build/sources    local dir=$2    # repository name, in general taken from the url, e.g.: bash-scripts    local prj=$3    # tag, e.g.: master    local tag=$4    [[ ( -z "$url" ) || ( -z "$dir" ) || ( -z "$prj" ) || ( -z "$tag" ) ]] && \        echo "ERROR: git_sparse_checkout: invalid arguments" && \        return 1    shift; shift; shift; shift    # Note: any remaining arguments after these above are considered as a    # list of files or directories to be downloaded.        mkdir -p ${dir}    if [ ! -d ${dir}/${prj} ] ;then        mkdir -p ${dir}/${prj}        pushd ${dir}/${prj}        git init        git config core.sparseCheckout true        local path="" # local scope        for path in $* ;do            echo "${path}" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout        done        git remote add origin ${url}        git fetch --depth=1 origin ${tag}        git checkout ${tag}        popd    fi}

This is an example of how this can be used:

function example_download_scripts {  url=http://github.com/frgomes/bash-scripts  dir=$(pwd)/sources  prj=bash-scripts  tag=master  git_sparse_checkout $url $dir $prj $tag "user-install/*" sysadmin-install/install-emacs.sh}

In the example above, notice that a directory must be followed by /* and must be between single quotes or double quotes.

UPDATE: An improved version can be found at: https://github.com/frgomes/bash-scripts/blob/master/bin/git_sparse_checkout

If you only want the files without history you can use svn:

SUBDIR=foosvn export https://github.com/repository.git/trunk/$SUBDIR