I recently worked on a new feature in a separate branch. It didn’t work out well, so I branched master again and tried another solution. However, I needed a specific filesI committed in the first feature branch. To avoid placing those files back in my working copy by hand, I used git to checkout the specific file from the other branch.
git checkout feature_1 -- path/to/file/iwant
This will not checkout the feature_1 branch, but instead checkout the most recent version of path/to/file/iwant in the feature_1 branch. Very handy indeed!