Question

I’m looking for a project that may or may not be checked into one of many subversion repositories. The machine with the actual repository died a few years ago, but I do have backups. They are bz compressed tar archives, snapshots taken weekly of the filesystem (when I unzip one and do a ls I get the following directories: conf dump help OpenVXI repositories working )

I’ve successfully done a dump on a late revision, and then installed subversion on my local machine, and installed the repository but I still don’t know what’s in it. How do I browse what’s inside these things, hopefully without the bother and work of checking out a copy of everything first?

I was hoping a svnadmin help command would let me peer inside these things but there does not seem to be an option like this available.

(I should probably note to all the curious that all of our active projects have been moved over to Assembla. The one I’m looking for has not been worked on for a few years)

Answer 1

You won’t be able to find much treating the repository as just another directory. As such the tool you probably want is svnlook.

svnlook tree <path-to-uncompressed-repository> | grep <what-you're-looking-for>

This will list all paths in the repository, and then filter the output with grep.

EDIT 1

Corrected the sub-command from list to tree

I hope this helps.