Distributed Life

If you ever want to remove a folder from SVN control (clean the folder by removing the .snv metadata folders) in Linux, you can simply run the following command:

rm -rf $(find path/to/the/CORRECT/folder -type d -name .svn)

where:

• rm -rf is remove recursive force. Recursive for deleting the directories and their contents recursively and force for no prompting (for example, for write protected files)
• $(..) is the command substitution, that takes the output of a command and uses it as input for another
• find path/to/the/CORRECT/folder -type d -name .svn is searching (recursively) for folders (d for directory) with the name .svn¹ in the directory pointed by path/to/the/CORRECT/folder

Be careful to use the correct path, else you can remove the svn metada for the wrong folder! A good approach can be to execute the find command without the rm, check the output, and then proceed to the remove :-).

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¹case sensitive, use -iname for insensitive