On Stefan’s blog on TortoiseSVN, he describes a trick that can be used to “unversion” an svn working copy — basically, how to remove all the .svn folders from a working copy. This is something that I do, periodically, so it’s nice to learn a new shortcut — and, I love shortcuts.
I figured that I would re-present the information here, for LabVIEW users, but try to simplify the instructions, a little bit.
To do this trick, you basically export the working copy onto itself — meaning, you choose the working copy’s location as your checkout destination (so that the export source and destination are the same). TortoiseSVN is smart about this and realizes what your trying to do, and it simply removes all the .svn folders from your working copy.
You can do this trick, one of two ways:
Method 1) Right click on your working copy and choose TortoiseSVN>>Export. In the resulting file dialog, browse to the working copy folder, select it, and choose OK.
Method 2) You can use the TortoiseSVN Right-Click Drag and Drop feature, using the technique shown in the screenshot below. First, make sure to select “Folders” to view the explorer tree. Second, use the File Explorer tree to select the working copy’s parent folder in the tree (Folders area to the left), so that the working copy folder is visible in tree and in the file list (area on the right). Third, right-click drag & drop your working copy from the file list (on the right) onto itself in the tree (on the left). Then, when the pop-up list of choices appears choose “SVN Export versioned items here”.
Method 1 is a little bit harder, IMO, since the file dialog is one of those awful Browse for Folder (explorer) dialogs (which I don’t like), instead of a standard File Dialog that you can use to paste in a path (which I prefer). But, Method 2 is trickier to understand, but hopefully the annotated screenshot, above, helps.
Do you know any other useful TortoiseSVN tips? Please leave a comment and share them.
Hi Jim, I just search for “svn” in the explorer and then only delete the “svn folders”.
Hi Sam, Thanks for the tip. Actually, I typically use the explorer search technique, too. One of the problems with this approach, however, is that “.svn” folders are “hidden” folders and the explorer search does not include hidden files or folders, by default — you have to make sure to reconfigure the explorer search to include them.
This is awesome. This just saved me a huge headache. Thanks!
Hi Jim
Thanx to you for shring us your experiance.
one comment - I check it iwith Tortiose 1.4.8 and it didnt work. 1.5.3 work as you described
Josh: Glad that it helped you.
Yonatan: Thanks for the info. This sounds like a great reason for everyone using 1.4.x to upgrade!
Variation for the command-line happy.
Aim carefully.
Using GNU or Cygwin tools:
find . -type d -name ‘.svn’ -exec rm -rf {} \;
Using Windows native tools:
for /f “usebackq” %x in (`dir /s/b/ad .svn`) do rmdir /s/q %x
David: Thanks for the tip.