SVN cat On Older Revision Location

Question

Lets say that I have a file that starts in directory1 and I move the file to directory2 in revision 2. The Node-copyfrom-rev in the dump file is 1. How do I extract the contents of the file based on only knowing where it might have previously been without a certainty of where it will end up in the most up to date working copy?

For instance, if I run

svn cat -r 1 directory1/file.txt,

you won't be able to find the file. You need to perform

svn cat -r 1 directory2/file.txt 

which requires knowledge that the file in the working copy exists in directory2 at the end.

Answer 1

There are two separate ways of specifying a revision:

1. Using the revision number: svn -r$rev $URL
2. Using a pinned revision number: svn $URL@$rev.

Think of the first way (plain revision number) as giving you a revision of a file, and the second way (the pinned revision number) as giving you the revision number of the directory.

For example, in revision 10, I did this:

$ svn co $REPO/trunk/foo
A foo/foo.txt
A foo/bar.txt
$ cd foo
$ svn delete bar.txt
$ svn commit -m"Removed bar.txt in revision 10"
committed revision 11

Now, it's revision 20 and I realize I need to see what bar.txt looked like. If I do this:

$ svn cat -r10 $REPO/trunk/foo/bar.txt

I'll get an error because there is no longer an element in my repository /trunk/foo/bar.txt. What I need to do is to also go back to the repository structure back in revision 10. I can do that by pinning revision 10 onto the URL:

$ svn cat -r10 $REPO/trunk/foo/bar.txt@10

That will give me the contents of bar.txt at revision 10 as it existed in the repository at revision 10.

---

Real Life Example

Let's look at my log:

$ svn log -v -r161077 $REPO/trunk/Tools/server_tools/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r161077 | dweintraub | 2013-05-23 17:02:03 -0400 (Thu, 23 May 2013) | 1 line
Changed paths:
   D /trunk/Tools/server_tools/jdescribe.pl

Deleting -- in wrong repository
------------------------------------------------------------------------
$

You can see that jdescribe.pl was deleted in revision 161077 of my repository. Thus, if I want it, I need to look at revision 161076:

If I do this:

$ svn ls -r161076 $REPO/trunk/Tools/server_tools       
find-required-jars.pl
jdescribe.pl
jenkins-bin/

There it is, in revision 161076 of the directory:

Let's concatenate out jdescribe.pl:

$ svn cat -r161076 $REPO/trunk/Tools/server_tools/jdescribe.pl
svn: warning: W160013: '/svn/TravelClickPD/!svn/rvr/161264/trunk/Tools/server_tools/jdescribe.pl' path not found
svn: E200009: Could not cat all targets because some targets don't exist
svn: E200009: Illegal target for the requested operation
$ 

Didn't work. There's no jdescribe.pl in the current revision of the directory.

Let's add the pinned revision:

$ svn cat -r161076 $REPO/trunk/Tools/server_tools/jdescribe.pl@161076 | head 
#! /usr/bin/env perl
# description.pl

use 5.12.0;
use warnings;

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST);
use Pod::Usage;
use Getopt::Long;

There it is!