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Sometimes its necessary to delete all the .svn folders from your subversion working copy.

Here is a simple way to do it on Linux:

rm -rf `find . -name .svn`

That might not work if you have hundreds or thousands of folders, as it might be too many arguments for the rm command. I still like it because its simple. But a more robust way would be:

find . -name .svn -prune -exec rm -rf {} \;

This calls rm on each file separately.

I haven’t tried the following, but on Windows you may be able to:

Create a cleanSVN.cmd file in the root containing these lines:

for /f “tokens=* delims=” %%i in (’dir /s /b /a:d *svn’) do (
rd /s /q “%%i”
)

You could also try browsing to the files in Windows Exporer and then:
Right click on the folder and click Search..
Enter .svn as the filename to search for.
Click “More advanced options” and select:
– Search hidden files and folders
– Search subfolders
Press search button and delete the folders you find appropriate.

The Windows tips came from Axel’s blog at http://www.axelscript.com/2008/03/11/delete-all-svn-files-in-windows/

This entry was posted on 2 July 2008 at 10:17 am and is filed under Linux, System Administration, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

9 Comments

  1. Jake Churchill says:

    You make my head hurt

    2 July 2008, 10:22 am

  2. Rob Wilkerson says:

    I do it slightly differently (very, very slightly) on Mac/Linux and wrote a simple registry entry to allow this to be done from the context menu on Windows. In case anyone’s interested:

    http://robwilkerson.org/2008/02/19/deleting-svn-folders/

    2 July 2008, 12:16 pm

  3. Steve says:

    Just curious – couldn’t you just do an SVN Export and then replace the original folder with the exported copy? The exported copy doesn’t have any of the .svn stuff in it.

    2 July 2008, 6:58 pm

  4. Rob Wilkerson says:

    @Steve

    Sure, you could do that, but it seems like a lot more work than right clicking on a parent folder and selecting an option from a context menu. And what if you have changes in your working copy from what’s in the repository?

    2 July 2008, 7:01 pm

  5. Ryan Stille says:

    @Steve, sometimes you can do an export, but sometimes you can’t. In my case I was working with files that had come from a backup of a working copy. The files in the repository were NOT what I needed, I needed the files from the backup of the working copy.

    2 July 2008, 7:32 pm

  6. Steve says:

    @Rob – I use TortoiseSVN, so for me it is a right-click, context menu op.

    @Rob,@Ryan – you can direct svn export to pull from the repo or your current working copy. I’ve only ever used it against my current working copy (so I learned something here!)

    3 July 2008, 6:58 am

  7. Rob Wilkerson says:

    @Steve

    I’d argue that it’s a delete-existing-right-click op, but that may just be splitting hairs. 🙂

    You can export from your own working copy or _to_ it? I know the latter, of course, and the problem is that you may be exporting from a repository to a working directory that has updated code. That was my concern. Nonetheless, it’s a 6-of-one-half-dozen-of-the-other thing. To each his own.

    3 July 2008, 10:05 am

  8. sandrar says:

    Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.  🙂 Cheers! Sandra. R.

    10 September 2009, 3:43 pm

  9. Piotr says:

    find -name ".svn" | xargs rm -fr

    7 April 2011, 1:14 pm