With GIT, sometimes it can be useful to import a full file from another branch without having to cherry-pick or rebase commits from that branch. Instead of doing the following manipulation:
git checkout stable_v1
cp src/main.cpp /tmp
git checkout master
cp /tmp/main.cpp src/main.cpp
GIT allows via the checkout command to import directly a file from another branch:
git checkout stable_v1 -- src/main.cpp