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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T00:33:17+00:00

I have a directory structure containing a bunch of config files for an application.

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I have a directory structure containing a bunch of config files for an application. The structure is maintained in Subversion, and then a few systems have that directory struture checked out. Developers make changes to the struture in the repository, and a script on the servers just runs an “svn update” periodically.

However, sometimes we have people who will inadvertently remove a .svn directory under one of the directories, or stick a file in that doesn’t belong. I do what I can to cut off the hands of the procedural unfaithful, but I’d still prefer for my update script to be able to gracefully (well, automatically) handle these changes.

So, what I need is a way to delete files which are not in subversion, and a way to go ahead and stomp on a local directory which is in the way of something in the repository. So, warnings like

Fetching external item into '/path/to/a/dir'
svn: warning: '/path/to/a/dir' is not a working copy

and

Fetching external item into '/path/to/another/dir'
svn: warning: Failed to add directory '/path/to/another/dir': an unversioned directory of the same name already exists

should be automatically resolved.

I’m concerned that I’ll have to either parse the svn status output in a script, or use the svn C API and write my own “cleanup” program to make this work (and yes, it has to work this way; rsync / tar+scp, and whatever else aren’t options for a variety of reasons). But if anyone has a solution (or partial solution) which takes care of the issue, I’d appreciate hearing about it. 🙂

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I wrote a perl script to first run svn cleanup to handle any locks, and then parse the –xml output of svn status, removing anything which has a bad status (except for externals, which are a little more complicated)

    Then I found this:
    http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/contrib/client-side/svn-clean
    Even though this doesn’t do everything I want, I’ll probably discard the bulk of my code and just enhance this a little. My XML parsing is not as pretty as it could be, and I’m sure this is somewhat faster than launching a system command (which matters on a very large repository and a command which is run every five minutes).

    I ultimately found that script in the answer to this question – Automatically remove Subversion unversioned files – hidden among all the suggestions to use Tortoise SVN.

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