I've been a command-line user of subversion (svn) for some time and have long enjoyed these little bits of bash foo.

Stripping .svn directories

I often start one-off little test projects in my private slush svn repository and then move them into their own repository for further development as (or if) they grow up. Sometimes you'll want to get rid of svn's footprints in a working directory.

rm -rfv `find . -name *\.svn`

The find . -name *\.svn finds all of the .svn folders that svn uses to track the repository and with the help of those handy back-tics, rm -rv does the recursive removal of svn tracking directories.

Adding new files

During that early "making lots of new stuff" phase, I often generate quite a number of files that need to be added to svn at once. This is one of those times where having (say) class files in their own subdirectory is nice. Running this command will svn add every file that isn't currently being tracked by svn in the current directory.

svn add `svn stat |grep \? |awk '{print $2}'`

Grep finds every svn stat output line that includes a question mark (meaning the item is not currently under version control) and pipes it through awk '{print $2}', which shows only the text (the filename) from the second column of the svn stat output. The back-tics and svn add finish the magic.

Using a Mulligan

I'll use something similar to the above along with svn revert to rollback a working copy "all the way." Say you're experimenting in your working directory; you've added a few files, hit a dead end, and want to revert the whole tree as well as delete anything you've added. In other words, you're looking for a full-on "do over." Using svn revert --recursive will revert any files that svn is tracking, but will leave anything svn is not tracking alone, so we have to also remove those files.

svn revert --recursive && rm -rf `svn stat |grep \? |awk '{print $2}'`

As with any other nerd foo, make sure that you really want to do what you're asking for when you use these commands. These make my life with svn just a little easier.