delete any .svn folders from a root folder to all its subfolders

Question

I have a folder that has a .SVN solution in it.

I want to go throught the entire directory and its subdirectories, and delete the .svn folder.

I have bash installed, so I can use grep if need.

Answer 1

I used this technique:

find [path] -name .svn -print0 | xargs -0 rm -R

It worked just fine for me.

Answer 2

You can combine find and rm with xargs to find and remove all .svn subdirectories from a root directory.

First test the find command to check if it finds the right subdirectories,

find . -name ".svn"

This should display a list of all .svn subdirectories in the current working directory (.). Make sure that these are indeed the directories that you want to remove. Then run the following command to actually remove them (note: this cannot be undone),

find . -name ".svn" | xargs rm -vrf

See man rm and man find for an explanation of the options.

Answer 3

find <path> -type d -name '.svn' -exec rm -rf {} \+

Finds all directories of name '.svn' and deletes them recursively.

I'd be really cautious of doing this if you don't own the checkout directory and don't understand why these directories are present. Also note roe's answer about svn export.

Answer 4

in bash:

removesvn() {
  cd $1
  for f in */.svn; do
    [ -d "$f" ] && removesvn ${f%/.svn}
  done
  [ -d "$f" ] && rm -rf .svn
}

removesvn .

should navigate down through all folders containing an .svn folder and remove it.

HOWEVER, you're probably better off using svn to export (svn export I beleive) a vanilla tree without versioning information, which is probably what you're looking for.

EDIT
Note that the bash script above only removes .svn folders which are connected to the original one (i.e. it won't remove a/b/c/.svn if b doesn't contain a .svn). If you just want to clear out .svn stuff in your filesystem, find will probably do a better job.