How to use git sparse-checkout in 2.25 and not checkout everything

Question

So after trying multiple tutorials, questions/answers I am still not able to get git sparse-checkout working on Windows 10 with git 2.25

Background

Our repo moved from perforce to git recently and now I am trying to get git working on Windows with my repo, but am failing miserably.

The repo itself is huge 20GB and there are files in there with names aux.c,aux.h,nul which are invalid in Windows. With Perforce it was simple to map only the required directory on Windows and work with it. I certainly don't need those files on Windows

What I have been trying

git clone --no-checkout --depth=1 <repo-url> test-dir
cd test-dir
git sparse-checkout init --cone

But the sparse-checkout tries to get a file named nul from a directory which fails

So I replaced sparse-checkout init with

git config core.sparsecheckout true
echo 'automation/python/my-automation' >> .\git\info\sparse-checkout
git read-tree -mu HEAD

It again runs into that invalid path error due to nul file 'automation/ruby/.../nul'

I thought maybe I am running into issue described here so I downgraded git version from 2.27 to 2.25, without luck :(

How do I skip these unnecessary files from checkout and work with only one directory ? I can't ask the other teams to delete their files :)

Answer 1

The file nul is a prohibited filename on Windows. There is a set of similar filenames that are prohibited.

see https://brendanforster.com/notes/fixing-invalid-git-paths-on-windows/ for possible work arounds.