Question

I’m testing out the Git sparse checkout functionality, using the manual and this page as a guide. I tried checking out a directory by creating a sparse-checkout file with following contents (actual names hidden of course):

dir1/

Then I run git read-tree -mu and afterwards I see dir1 in my repository as expected. Next I decide to checkout a new directory so I update the contents of the sparse-checkout file again to look like this:

dir1/
dir2/

Then I run git read-tree -mu and afterwards I see the following non-nested directories:

dir1
dir2
dir3
dir4

Why are the extra directories appearing? Is it a bug in Git? Note that if I remove dir2/ from the sparse-checkout file they all seem to disappear as a group as well.

Answer 1

due to missing slash at start of dir: “dir2” should have read “/dir2”