What is intermediate directories in SVN?

Question

I just started to learn SVN. Please give me your advice to understand the basic theory below.

The svn copy and svn move command have an option called --parents. It says without --parents option, it would not create intermediate directories.

Could anyone tell me what intermediate directories are?

Answer 1

Let’s say you just created a new Java project in Subversion. You now have an empty directory, and you want to create a directory for your source files. I like to follow Maven directory structure even if I’m not using Maven. Maven says my source files should be under the src/main/java directory. Since my company is VegiBank.com and this is their foundation project, I want to create the directory src/main/java/com/vegibank/foundation. I could do this:

$ svn mkdir src
$ svn mkdir src/main
$ svn mkdir src/main/java
$ svn mkdir src/main/java/com
$ svn mkdir src/main/java/com/vegibank
$ svn mkdir src/main/java/com/vegibank/foundation

I have to first create the directory in order to create the subdirectory. However, with the --parents option, I can replace all of those with a single command:

$ svn mkdir --parents src/main/java/com/vegibank/foundation

That makes the entire directory tree without me creating each single subdirectory one at a time.