git checkout only certain file types for entire project

You don't need find or sed, you can use wildcards as git understands them (doesn't depend on your shell):

git checkout -- "*.xml"

The quotes will prevent your shell to expand the command to only files in the current directory before its execution.

You can also disable shell glob expansion (with bash) :

set -f
git checkout -- *.xml

This, of course, will irremediably erase your changes!

On PowerShell (Windows, haven't tried PowerShell Core+Linux), I was able to do it like this

git ls-tree master -r --name-only | sls ".cscfg" | foreach { git checkout origin/master -- $_ }

Dadaso's answer git checkout -- "*.xml" checks out all .xml files recursively from index to working directory.

However for some reasons git checkout branch-name -- "*.xml" (checking out files from branch-name branch) doesn't work recursively and only checks "xml" files in root directory.

So IMO the best is to use git ls-tree then filter file names you are interested in and pass it to git checkout branch-name --. Here are the commands you can use:

• Bash (and git bash on windows) version:

  git ls-tree branch-name --full-tree --name-only -r | grep "\.xml" | xargs git checkout branch-name --
  

• cmd (windows) version (if you don't have "C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin" in you PATH):

  git ls-tree branch-name --full-tree --name-only -r | "C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\grep.exe" "\.xml" | "C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\xargs.exe" git checkout branch-name --
  

• for powershell it's still better to call cmd.exe because it's much faster (powershell doesn't have good support for native stdin/stdout pipelining):

  cmd.exe /C 'git ls-tree branch-name --full-tree --name-only -r | "C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\grep.exe" "\.xml" | "C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\xargs.exe" git checkout branch-name --'
  

• However you you have small number of files you can try this in powershell (like in @aoetalks answer). But I found it extremely slow for couple of houndeds files:

  git ls-tree branch-name --full-tree --name-only -r | sls "\.xml" | %{ git checkout branch-name -- $_ }
  

UPDATE: Check Dadaso's answer for a solution that will work in most of cases.

You can try something like this, using git ls-tree and grep:

git checkout origin/master -- `git ls-tree origin/master -r --name-only | grep ".xlf"`

Note this expects a remote origin in a master branch. Also you must provide the right filter/extension to grep.

Before this command, you should have done something like this:

git init
git remote add origin <project.git>
git fetch