Question

Does such a thing exist in subversion?

In perforce we used to have to do this quite often especially when Perforce got the incremental update wrong – It does not seem possible in Subversion

Is an alternative to delete the .svn file and do an update?

Answer 1

svn up generally does the trick. Occasionally, your working copy can get into a bad state, requiring svn cleanup. Very occasionally, even that doesn’t work, and the simplest fix is to svn co into a clean directory.

For a prohibitively large working copy, you might be able to avoid svn co if you can isolate a subtree causing problems, delete it, then svn up.