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SVN Error - Not a working copy

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svn

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What is a svn working copy?

A Subversion working copy is your own private working area, which looks like any other ordinary directory on your system. It contains a COPY of those files which you will have been editing on the website. You can edit these files however you wish, in the usual way.

How do I find my svn working copy?

The working copy will be located in a directory called trunk on your computer relative to the directory you issued the command in. If you wish to have a different name for your working copy you can add that as a parameter to the end of the command. e.g. This will create a working copy called MyProjectSource .

How do I create a working copy in TortoiseSVN?

Right click on the checked out folder, then use TortoiseSVN → Repo-Browser to bring up the repository browser. Find the sub-folder you would like to add to your working copy, then use Context Menu → Update item to revision....


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.


I got into a similar situation (svn: 'papers' is not a working copy directory) a different way, so I thought I'd post my battle story (simplified):

$ svn add papers
svn: Can't create directory 'papers/.svn': Permission denied

Oops! fix permissions... then:

$ svn add papers
svn: warning: 'papers' is already under version control
$ svn st
~     papers
$ svn cleanup
svn: 'papers' is not a working copy directory

And even moving papers out of the way and running svn up (which worked for the OP) didn't fix it. Here's what I did:

$ mv papers papers_
$ svn cleanup
$ svn revert papers
Reverted 'papers'
$ mv papers_/ papers
$ svn add papers

That worked.


I solved it by

  1. Copy a backup of the impacted folders
  2. SVN revert the impacted folders
  3. Paste the files back from the backup

In my case the problem was due to deleted .svn-files.


Maybe you just copied tree of folder and trying to add lowest one.

SVN
|_
  |
  subfolder1
       |
       subfolder2   (here you get an error)

in that case you have to commit directory on the upper level.


Workaround: Rename directory which is not 'working copy' Checkout/update/restore this directory again Move files from renamed directory to new Commit changes

Reason: You made some changes to some files under .svn directory, this breaks 'working copy'


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