Subversion stuck due to “previous operation has not finished”?

Question

If I try to update my subversion repo, it says I must run cleanup. If I run cleanup, it says a file is missing. (I deleted a MASSIVE directory of files that failed to commit

Answer 1

This can happen when you have files still open when you try to SVN switch / cleanup.

I had a branch where I had created a new file, which I had open in another application. Switching to another branch could not remove the file causing the switch to fail. This was also causing the svn cleanup to fail, however this is not displayed as the reason in the Tortoise SVN UI.

Running svn cleanup from a console window (on the root folder) clearly shows the error file\location\file.ext: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process

Closing any open file handles / windows and running the console svn cleanup then allows the cleanup to work correctly.

Long story short - run svn cleanup in the console to see a more detailed error.