Question

How to do svn update of multiple files located across different directories ?

For committing multiple files from different directories, we can put them all up in a text file and give that file as an argument to svn commit and it will happily commit all those files. But update ?

EDIT: Mr. Fooz’s answer is definitely an option whereby I can create a .bat or .sh file with all the svn updates. But I would like to know if there are any special arguments that svn provide that can be used instead of a file with loads of svn update commands in it. Please note that the file that is used by svn commit contains only the filenames and no svn commands.

Answer 1

Given that there are valid reasons for selectively updating from a repository when there are a lot of downstream changes available, my question would be whether you’re trying to do this on a UNIX/Linux/etc. system or Windows. If Windows, I don’t know how to do an equivalent of the following:

svn update `cat list_of_files` 

(There are corner-cases, similar to running ‘find … | xargs cmd …’, where spaces or shell-sensitive characters in the file names could cause problems. You’ll have to deal with those by properly escaping such problem-characters.)

If, for some frightening reason, your list of files is so astronomically-large that it breaks the shell command-line-length limit, you can do this instead:

cat list_of_files | xargs svn update 

Two things to keep in mind while using either of these:

1. All file names will have to be either absolute, or relative to the point you’re running the command from.
2. If one of the ‘files’ in your list is actually a directory, all the files in that directory that have changes available will be updated.