Is there a way to use wildcard delete with command-line SVN?

Question

In the tags/ directory of my SVN repo, I have something like:

TAG_BUILD_001
TAG_BUILD_002
TAG_BUILD_003
TAG_BUILD_004
...
TAG_BUILD_100
TAG_BUILD_101
...

Is there a way to delete, say, everything from BUILD_001 to BUILD_099 quickly?

I tried:

svn rm https://host/module/tags/TAG_BUILD_0*

but that doesn't seem to work and I got the following error:

svn: URL 'https://host/module/tags/TAG_BUILD_0*' non-existent in that revision

Answer 1

Actually, svn delete does take wildcards, but only if you're doing a local delete and not through a URL. The solution is to do a checkout of the tags directory, then delete the tags.

Now, normally, doing this would require gobs of time and multiple gigabytes of space since each tag would represent a revision of your entire project. If each tag is 100 megabytes in size, your checkout would be 10 Gigabytes.

However, the svn co command now takes the --depth parameter:

$ svn checkout --depth immediates https://host/module/tags svn-tags

Now, you'll checkout all of the tags, but none of their contents. That takes only a few minutes to checkout and almost no room on your computer since these are all empty directories. Now, you can use:

$ cd svn-tags
$ svn rm TAG_BUILD_00*
$ svn commit -m"Removed tags 000 through 099"

And, best of all, it's all done in a single revision.

Answer 2

Use the shell:

for i in $(seq -w 1 13)
do
  echo "https://host/module/tags/TAG_BUILD_$i"
done

Run it and take a look at the commands you generated. If you're sure this is really what you want to do, pipe the output to bash.