SVN Commit Fun

I know, I know, I should be using Git. Well, I do. I use it for everything I have under my control. Unfortunately, like many, I still have obligations that require me to use SVN on a regular basis. And when I roll with SVN, I roll command line. No, its not an elitist, terminal God point of view. I happen to like TortoiseSVN, but 90% of my SVN versioned work is on Linux servers.

If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself frequently using this lazy command line syntax inside your project directory to catch all your changes in one commit:

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svn commit * -m "you should always leave a message!"

And there’s a very good chance you’ve run into this error, or something similar:

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svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: '/path/to/unversioned_file' is not under version control

As it turns out, there doesn’t appear to be a way to ignore unversioned files in the svn commit options. Now before you sart leaving comments about the svn:ignore property of the SVN configuration, realize that it only applies to the svn add, svn import, and svn status commands. It has no impact on svn commit calls so we need another solution.

To that end, I put together a simple one-liner shell script to perform an SVN commit on all versioned files within the current directory, ignoring all unversioned files. Here it is:

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svn status | grep ^[^?] | awk '{print $2}' | xargs svn commit -m "my commit message"

In case that makes no sense, it performs the following operations:

1. Call svn status to get a full list of relevant project files.
2. The question mark (?) in svn status signifies an unversioned file. The grep regular expression only matches files that do not start with that question mark.
3. Use awk to print the second column from the svn status call, which is the filename.
4. Use xargs to feed the filename list from awk to our svn commit call.

You can take this all one step further (as I have) and turn it into a bash script accepting your commit message as its only argument (signified by the ${1}).

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#!/bin/bash
svn status | grep ^[^?] | awk '{print $2}' | xargs svn commit -m "${1}";

There you go, happy SVN’ing.