How to sparsely checkout only one single file from a git repository?

Question

How do I checkout just one file from a git repo?

Answer 1

Two variants on what's already been given:

git archive --format=tar --remote=git://git.foo.com/project.git HEAD:path/to/directory filename | tar -O -xf -

and:

git archive --format=zip --remote=git://git.foo.com/project.git HEAD:path/to/directory filename | funzip

These write the file to standard output.