Sometimes you have files in your SVN folder that you don’t want to include in the svn. For example let’s say svn status gives the following result:

M       data/data.tex
?       data/data.aux
?       mydoc.bbl
?       mydoc.blg
?       mydoc.log
?       mydoc.out
M       mydoc.tex
M       mydoc.pdf
?       mydoc.toc

All these files are temporary files that LaTeX creates and I don’t want them in my SVN. Is there some way that I don’t have to see them anymore everytime I check what I have changed? YES! There’s a SVN property that you can set for a folder which is called "ignore".

So to ignore all files with the extension aux in the current directory, you can do this:

svn propset svn:ignore *.aux .

But doing that for every one of the five filetypes is already too much for me. Also, the setting applies only to one folder, I would need to repeat the same thing for each subfolder! Fortunately, you can (a) specify a file which contains the stuff to be ignored and (b) call the command recursively on all subfolders. So I write all the things I want to ignore (*.aux, *.bbl, *.blg, *.out, *.toc) into the file ignorethisyoustupidsvn.txt (one pattern per line) and execute the following command:

svn propset svn:ignore -R -F ignorethisyoustupidsvn.txt .

Now let’s do svn status again:

M       data/data.tex
M       mydoc.tex
M       mydoc.pdf

Yay 🙂

Links: SVN properties documentation, Getting svn to ignore files and directories (superchlorine)