How to delete all unversioned/ignored files/folders in the working copy

ignoresvntortoisesvn

If I have a working copy of a Subversion repository, is there a way to delete all unversioned or ignored files in that working copy with a single command or tool? Essentially, I'm looking for the SVN analogue to git clean.

Either a command line or GUI solution (for TortoiseSVN) would be acceptable.

Best Answer

svn status --no-ignore | grep '^[I?]' | cut -c 9- | while IFS= read -r f; do rm -rf "$f"; done

This has the following features:

  • Both ignored and untracked files are deleted
  • It works even if a file name contains whitespace (except for newline, but there's not much that can be done about that other than use the --xml option and parse the resulting xml output)
  • It works even if svn status prints other status characters before the file name (which it shouldn't because the files are not tracked, but just in case...)
  • It should work on any POSIX-compliant system

I use a shell script named svnclean that contains the following:

#!/bin/sh

# make sure this script exits with a non-zero return value if the
# current directory is not in a svn working directory
svn info >/dev/null || exit 1

svn status --no-ignore | grep '^[I?]' | cut -c 9- |
# setting IFS to the empty string ensures that any leading or
# trailing whitespace is not trimmed from the filename
while IFS= read -r f; do
    # tell the user which file is being deleted.  use printf
    # instead of echo because different implementations of echo do
    # different things if the arguments begin with hyphens or
    # contain backslashes; the behavior of printf is consistent
    printf '%s\n' "Deleting ${f}..."
    # if rm -rf can't delete the file, something is wrong so bail
    rm -rf "${f}" || exit 1
done
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