Recursively Delete .svn Directories

Discussion

1. Buri

   IMHO its better to use
   
find . -type d -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} +

   since it saves system resources. And IFAIK all todays bash support + operator.
• Toni Lähdekorpi

  Does bash really matter here? I thought the + operator was just an option of the latest find versions.
2. Nick G

   Here’s a registry file to add the same to a windows folder right-click that comes in handy now and then;

   (Code highlight that! lol)

   
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

   [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\DeleteSVN\command]
@="cmd.exe /c \"TITLE Removing SVN Folders in %1 && COLOR 9A && FOR /r \"%1\" %%f IN (.svn) DO RD /s /q \"%%f\" \""

• David Walsh

  Awesome Nick! Thank you!
3. goyote

   What does {} \; do?
• Eric Wendelin

  The ‘{}’ references the file being acted upon by ‘-exec’ and ‘\;’ terminates the exec command
4. Will

   You might also consider using the svn export command; it was made for this.
• Matthew F.

  What I came to say – I always copy files from my repository using:

  svn export –force RepositoryURL /path/to/target

  (–force tells it to continue even if it is overwriting files – e.g. if you’re exporting the latest revision to a directory where the files already exist)

  That also guarantees that only version controlled files get exported – for example, if you have a file with sensitive data in your development directory that is not under version control, you won’t accidentally make it world readable. Don’t have to do that more than once before you get very careful about what you publish :(
• Jason

  I have an old backup of a bunch of SVN repos, and the source repos no longer exist, but I have backups I would like to commit into an new GIT repo, so I need to cleanse them of the .svn folders that were created when I checked the code out the first time.
5. Archit Baweja

   @goyote, {} is a placeholder for the argument to the -exec clause. The main find , obviously enough , just finds the files, and plugs them in to the -exec clause where it finds the {}.

   For more refer to the man page ;) (man 1 find). Or on the web @ http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?find
6. Chris

   Funnily enough I posted the same sort of article a week ago. From my own testing I discovered adding the -depth flag was useful for preventing error messages like “find: ./.svn: No such file or directory”

   @Will – yes it is useful using svn export to get a clean tree but it is potentially possible that a) the svn repository is no longer available or b) you want to ensure you don’t lose any files that are not actually in svn.
7. Beau

   I’ve always used this and it works great, but always test before executing the rm command.

   
find . | grep .svn | xargs rm -rf

8. eclipxe

   You better use -delete parameter of find instead of -exec rm -rf {} \;
   like:

   find -type d -name .svn -delete

   check the man page of find command
9. torkil

   Also sounds like you should import from subversion to git.
   http://help.github.com/svn-importing/
• Alex

  If only I could use git at work… .. ..
10. craig

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

  This find... approach has the deficiency that if you have many folders, it may become too large for the command line. Using xargs is an option but what eclipxe proposed: ‘find -type d -name .svn -delete’ is simple, short and effective.
11. Sheldon

    I have always used this; rm -rf `find . -name .svn`

    http://sheldon.lendrum.co.nz/removing-svn-directories-recursively_386/04/
12. wallace

    I’d be inclined to enclose .svn in quotes (or at least escape with \.svn), as the . will match any character (regex). If you’re random enough to have a directory called nsvn, it would also be deleted.
13. Daniel Dimitrov

    On win7 I just tend to type *.svn in the explorer’s search box and after that ctrl+A => delete :)
14. Mist. GraphX

    It can be useful to remove sass-cache folders before an initial commit to svn, thanks.

    rm -rfv find . -type d -name .sass-cache