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How do I recursively delete all .svn directories, starting with the directory I am in?

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    What platform -- Windows? Linux/UNIX? Something else?
    – Callie J
    Jun 1, 2011 at 15:36
  • possible duplicate of Command to recursively remove all .svn directories on Windows
    – Callie J
    Jun 1, 2011 at 15:37
  • It's on Linux, Debian
    – FinalForm
    Jun 1, 2011 at 15:38
  • Funny enough, I needed this in the morning when committing something to a mercurial repository. I ended up adding everything and removing the .svn folders before committing instead. And now you come up with this question, apparently Ned's solution is what I needed... Jun 1, 2011 at 18:49

3 Answers 3

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Keep in mind that svn provides the "export" command that provides you with a copy of your working tree, but without all the .svn directories sprinkled in. This could be what you want.

$ svn export /tmp/copy_of_my_tree
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  • this won't work for a repo, you have no access to (e.g. zipped and mailed to you)
    – mbx
    Aug 8, 2011 at 15:24
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If you're working in Linux (or equivalent), you can just do the following:

find . -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;
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    Or, better, and as Piskvor mentions, use -type d to ensure that one isn't accidentally deleting something that isn't a directory.
    – JdeBP
    Jun 1, 2011 at 21:10
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In any modern UN*X-like system (Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD):

find . -type d -name '.svn' -exec rm -rf {} \;

find:

  • in the current directory
  • directories
  • with name .svn
  • and when found, run rm -rf on each
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  • 4
    That's almost the canonical idiom. You forgot xargs to reduce the number of rm processes needed: find . -type d -name '.svn' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf --
    – JdeBP
    Jun 1, 2011 at 21:12
  • To add to @JdeBP's comment: Some find implementations also support -exec rm -rf {} + or even -delete to achieve the same thing. Jun 2, 2011 at 11:06

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