Subversion problem with case insensitive filesystems

If you are using SVN with Linux/Mac and Windows XP you may run into this problem sooner or later. The cause of the problem is the case-sensitive characteristic of Linux/Mac systems not getting along with the insensitive Windows XP, which results in an error message like this:

 svn: In directory '.'  
 svn: Can't open file '.svn\tmp\text-base\qt_temp.N19845.svn-base': The system ca  
 nnot find the file specified.  

Fortunately the solution is quite simple, first access the working copy through Linux/Mac and remove from the repository the file that is causing the problem with the following command:

 svn delete --keep-local the_file  

Then commit your changes:

 svn ci  

Now go to your Windows XP system and everything should be working.

Remove svn folders recursively

Today I was about to zip and send some code folders to a co-worker, at that point what I needed was a simple feature to remove all svn related things from this folder and recursively through all subfolders, I still don't know isn't this included as a feature by kdesvn, eSvn, QSvn or RapidSVN.

I'm a Linux user so this will do the trick:

find . -name ".svn" -exec rm -rf {} \;
 

In case you are using Windows and probably Tortoise you can go this way:

Export the current copy and choose a different folder, it will copy the code there and it will remove all svn things. Beware that if you choose the same folder Tortoise will just remove things without copying anything.

Well I hope this helps ;)

Removing files in Linux

The best thing about Linux is the console, one of the many useful uses is the way you can handle (find, move, create, delete) files, a quick example of this is removing all hidden .svn directories:

rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`

Make sure that you use "`" and not "'", you can also try removing all java files in a
folder using this one:

rm -rf `find . -type f -name *.java`

Simple and painles ;)