Question

Whenever I create a new Ruby on Rails project, I tell SVN to ignore some folders, such as log. It’s simple to do, with these commands:

svn remove log/*
svn propset svn:ignore "*" log/

Another folder which shoud obviously not make it to SVN is tmp. So, I always try to do the same operations on it but SVN doesn’t seem to ignore it… It sends me those messages in order when I execute the previous commands:

svn: 'tmp' is not a working copy
svn: warning: 'tmp' is not under version control

Seems fine to me… the problem is that the “svn status” commands still output this:

?       tmp

How can I get rid of this question mark?

Answer 1

Add the tmp directory name to the svn:ignore property for the parent directory:

svn propset svn:ignore tmp .

Note that the svn:ignore property is a multiline list of file patterns to ignore, so it’s usually better to edit it with svn propedit:

svn propedit svn:ignore .

Using svn propset will completely overwrite whatever else you had in that property when setting the new value.