Fun at the Command Line: Add All Files in a Directory Tree to SVN (subversion)

Greg — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:26:23 +0000

I often update code by adding files in a bunch of directories and then need to add all thosefiles to the svn repository. Here is the command line one-liner to get that done and an explanation:

svn stat | grep "^?" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs svn add

svn stat tells you the status of all the files in the directory with a question mark at the beginning of the line for any files that svn doesn't currently know about (i.e. that aren't under revision control).
The next step is to pipe that to a grep command that looks for lines beginning with a question mark so that we can add only those items to svn.
Next, since the output of svn stat is a two column listing split by whitespace with the status indicator first and the full path to the file second, we use a simple awk pattern to print out just filename
Finally, we use the xargs command to take the input and pass it on to the svn add command which schedules the files to be added to the repository.

I will typically run svn stat | less first and review the output to make sure that the command is only going to add things I want. I do the same thing just before any commit. If you need to undo the addition of some file prior to the commit, simply svn revert filename or use the recursive flag like svn revert --recursive path/to/directory/ if you are dealing with a directory.

Once you're happy with the changes, all you need to do is an actual svn commit so that the files will be permanently added to the repository.

Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - command line

Fun at the Command Line: Add All Files in a Directory Tree to SVN (subversion)