Question

For many Subversion operations, appending the ‘@’ symbol to the end of a file or URL argument allows you to target a specific revision of that file. For example, ‘svn info test.txt@1234’ will give information about test.txt as it existed in revision 1234.

However, when the name of the file contains an @, it is incorrectly interpreted by Subversion as a revision specifier:

svn info ‘test@.txt’ svn: Syntax error parsing revision ‘.txt’

I’ve tried double and single quotes as well as escaping with ‘/’, ‘\’, and ‘@’. How can I tell Subversion to treat the @ symbols as part of the file name?

Answer 1

From the SVN book (emphasis added):

The perceptive reader is probably wondering at this point whether the peg revision syntax causes problems for working copy paths or URLs that actually have at signs in them. After all, how does svn know whether news@11 is the name of a directory in my tree or just a syntax for “revision 11 of news”? Thankfully, while svn will always assume the latter, there is a trivial workaround. You need only append an at sign to the end of the path, such as news@11@. svn cares only about the last at sign in the argument, and it is not considered illegal to omit a literal peg revision specifier after that at sign. This workaround even applies to paths that end in an at sign—you would use filename@@ to talk about a file named filename@.