How to git-cherry-pick only changes to certain files?

If I want to merge into a Git branch the changes made only to some of the files changed in a particular commit which includes changes to multiple files, how can this be achieved?

Suppose the Git commit called stuff has changes to files A, B, C, and D but I want to merge only stuff's changes to files A and B. It sounds like a job for git cherry-pick but cherry-pick only knows how to merge entire commits, not a subset of the files.

I'd do it with cherry-pick -n (--no-commit) which lets you inspect (and modify) the result before committing:

git cherry-pick -n <commit>

# unstage modifications you don't want to keep, and remove the
# modifications from the work tree as well.
# this does work recursively!
git checkout HEAD <path>

# commit; the message will have been stored for you by cherry-pick
git commit

If the vast majority of modifications are things you don't want, instead of checking out individual paths (the middle step), you could reset everything back, then add in what you want:

# unstage everything
git reset HEAD

# stage the modifications you do want
git add <path>

# make the work tree match the index
# (do this from the top level of the repo)
git checkout .

The other methods didn't work for me since the commit had a lot of changes and conflicts to a lot of other files. What I came up with was simply

git show SHA -- file1.txt file2.txt | git apply -

It doesn't actually add the files or do a commit for you so you may need to follow it up with

git add file1.txt file2.txt
git commit -c SHA

Or if you want to skip the add you can use the --cached argument to git apply

git show SHA -- file1.txt file2.txt | git apply --cached -

You can also do the same thing for entire directories

git show SHA -- dir1 dir2 | git apply -