How to merge a specific commit in Git

'git cherry-pick' should be your answer here.

Apply the change introduced by an existing commit.

Do not forget to read bdonlan's answer about the consequence of cherry-picking in this post:
"Pull all commits from a branch, push specified commits to another", where:

A-----B------C \  \   D

becomes:

A-----B------C \  \   D-----C'

The problem with this commit is that git considers commits to include all history before them

Where C' has a different SHA-1 ID.
Likewise, cherry picking a commit from one branch to another basically involves generating a patch, then applying it, thus losing history that way as well.

This changing of commit IDs breaks git's merging functionality among other things (though if used sparingly there are heuristics that will paper over this).
More importantly though, it ignores functional dependencies - if C actually used a function defined in B, you'll never know.

You can use git cherry-pick to apply a single commit by itself to your current branch.

Example: git cherry-pick d42c389f

Let's try to take an example and understand:

I have a branch, say master, pointing to X <commit-id>, and I have a new branch pointing to Y <sha1>.

Where Y <commit-id> = <master> branch commits - few commits

Now say for Y branch I have to gap-close the commits between the master branch and the new branch. Below is the procedure we can follow:

Step 1:

git checkout -b local origin/new

where local is the branch name. Any name can be given.

Step 2:

  git merge origin/master --no-ff --stat -v --log=300

Merge the commits from master branch to new branch and also create a merge commit of log message with one-line descriptions from at most <n> actual commits that are being merged.

For more information and parameters about Git merge, please refer to:

git merge --help

Also if you need to merge a specific commit, then you can use:

git cherry-pick <commit-id>