Question

We would like to trace removal of a single line in a certain file amongst the many revisions to that file in SVN.

I tried looking at various revisions / diffs to see when it was removed, but was unable to find the offending revision. How do we do this using a svn command?

Answer 1

If you’re on Linux and you know in which file to look you can use that shell script to output all the revision of that file.

#!/bin/bash
svn log "$1" -q | grep -oE r[0-9]+ | xargs -t -n1 -r -d '\n' svn cat "$1" -r

Pass a working copy file name or repository URL as a parameter to this script.

If everything else fail and you’re doing regular dumps using svnadmin dump without the --incremental switch you could grep for the text in the latest dump file.

Non-incremental dumps contain the full text for each revision of every files.