Remove All .svn Folders From An Application June 14

• Posted in Command Line, Programming, Subversion

There are a lot of situations that call for taking a working copy and completely removing it from Subversion.  In most cases, you can use ’svn export [repo_path]‘ to check-out a copy without keeping it tethered to the repo, but sometimes that isn’t an option (for instance, if the repo no longer exists).

You could use the “manual search and destroy” method for removing the .svn directories, but that can be time-consuming.  The quick and easy way is to use the following command in your Terminal:

$ cd /path/to/application/directory
$ find . -name “.svn” -exec rm -rf {} \;

This command can be used to remove any pesky directories or files that are scattered throughout a directory tree - just change “.svn” to the name of the file or directory that you wish to eliminate (for example, “.DS_Store”).

Hope this helps anyone who is looking for a quick way to get rid of those pesky files and remove your application from version control.

Tags: commands, Subversion, svn, Terminal