Recursively remove .svn files

December 16th, 2005

Here’s a quick shell script to recursively remove all the the .svn files starting in the current directory and working down.

find . -type f -name "*.svn" -exec rm '{}' \; -print

Change .svn to look for different types.

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Posted by Simon Filed in OS X
8 Comments »

8 Responses to “Recursively remove .svn files”


  1. Mike Says:
    September 7th, 2007 at 12:39 am

    This creates a “Run Shell Script” that never goes away in my title bar…

    Are you sure this is doesn’t end up looping?


  2. Hardwarerocks Says:
    September 18th, 2007 at 1:45 pm

    The code above will not work.. Error.. warning: the -d option is deprecated; please use -depth instead, because the latter is a POSIX-compliant feature.

    This one works.. find . -type f -name “*.svn” -exec rm ‘{}’ \; -print


  3. Simon Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 10:16 am

    Mike – not sure how you’ve run the script but it’s always been fine for me. Have you any other details.

    Hardwarerocks – Thanks for the info, the man page for find on my install (OS X Tiger) doesn’t mention that -d is deprectated. However I’ve changed the post accordingly.


  4. David Says:
    February 21st, 2008 at 10:48 am

    The .svn ‘files’ in question are folders which contain the subversion meta-data, including the pristine copies of the checked-out files of your working tree; deleting them means the tree can’t be used as a subversion working tree.

    I’m puzzled that you would want to treat an svn working tree this way, unless you specifically want a checked-out copy of the repository without the .svn folders. That’s what ‘svn export’ is for.


  5. Akshay Surve Says:
    February 23rd, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    The semicolon afer .svn is missing.


  6. Simon Says:
    September 28th, 2008 at 2:35 pm

    @ David

    I understand where you’re coming from and if you use subversion correctly there should never be a need to remove the hidden svn files. However, from time to time, I do find that it’s necessary – generally when someone has mistakenly duplicated directories using the Finder in OSX.


  7. Bob Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 4:28 pm

    With the slightest of tweaks, this was actually useful to me. Sometimes svn crashes and leaves your working copy ‘locked’. Changing the cmd-line to:

    find -type f -name “lock” -exec rm ‘{}’ \; -print

    …enabled me to quickly get rid of all those pesky lock files.

    Just make sure there’s no real content called “lock” ;)


  8. Mahbub Says:
    May 25th, 2010 at 4:08 am

    How about

    rm -rf find . -type d -name .svn

    It works for me :)

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