Automatically remove Subversion unversioned files

Question

Does anybody know a way to recursively remove all files in a working copy that are not under version control? (I need this to get more reliable results in my automatic build

Answer 1

svn st --no-ignore  | grep '^[?I]' | sed 's/^[?I]  *//' | xargs -r -d '\n' rm -r

This is a unix shell command to delete all files not under subversion control.

Notes:

• the st in svn st is an build-in alias for status, i.e. the command is equivalent to svn status
• --no-ignore also includes non-repository files in the status output, otherwise ignores via mechanisms like .cvsignore etc. - since the goal is to have a clean starting point for builds this switch is a must
• the grep filters the output such that only files unknown to subversion are left - the lines beginning with ? list files unknown to subversion that would be ignored without the --no-ignore option
• the prefix up to the filename is remove via sed
• the xargs command is instructed via -r to not execute rm, when the argument list would be empty
• the -d '\n' option tells xargs to use a newline as delimiter such the command also works for filenames with spaces
• rm -r is used in case complete directories (that are not part of the repository) need to be removed