Svn error “Previous operation has not finished”

If you get a "not a working copy" when doing a recursive svn cleanup my guess is that you have a directory which should be a working copy (i.e. the .svn directory at the top level says so), but it is missing its own .svn directory. In that case, you could try to just remove/move that directory and then do a local update (i.e. rm -rf content; svn checkout content).

If you get a not a working copy error, it means that Subversion cannot find a proper .svn directory in there. Check to see if there is an .svn directory in contents

The ideal solution is a fresh checkout, if possible.

There is often no need for a new checkout or copying.

I have just solved a similar issue relating to the error "previous operation has not finished" with help from this (Link)

It seems that svn sometimes gets stuck while processing commands/operations. All of these operations are stored in the database file wc.db in the .svn folder.

By downloading SQLite to my checkout directory and running

sqlite3.exe .svn/wc.db "select * from work_queue"

you can get a list of all pending operations. These operations are the ones the error is referring to as "not finished".

By running

sqlite3.exe .svn/wc.db "delete from work_queue"

all of the old operations are deleted from the work queue and the error disapears. No need for a new checkout or anything