This example grabs the Node.gitignore file from GitHub's gitignore repository, downloads it to your current working directory and renames it to .gitignore - all very typical actions for someone starting a new node.js project.

$ curl http://github.com/github/gitignore/raw/master/Node.gitignore -o .gitignore

1. navigate to the desired file in a repository
2. click the 'raw' button
3. copy the url from the address bar

See the following example from GitHub's gitignore repository: http://github.com/github/gitignore/raw/master/Node.gitignore

You can quickly recognize a url that will work to download an individual file vs downloading the html page. Look for the subdirectory /raw/ right before the branch name.