Title: Two simple Bash commands to tag & drop many svn branches Date: 2013-11-04 Tags: svn, scripting, linux, bash

I’m doing a bit of cleanup of some old branches in Subversion for a current client of mine. These were all released but never tagged; each release had its own long-lived branch (almost immortal, until today).

I broke it into two steps so I could test it on a small set first, but the following commands:

1. list the branches that match my pattern into a file
2. then tag and drop each branch listed in that file

Note I did not put the branch/tag names in quotes; these branches do have spaces but I did not end up needing to escape them. YMMV. Also, I have no doubt there are more efficient ways to do this ( and I’d love to hear them: +damon.overboe or @DamonOverboe ), but it took me more time to write these notes so I can repeat this in the future than it did to run this.

Also note I am running these directly against the repository!

1. Prep - store your IFS value; we’ll set it to null later to preserve whitespace:

   OLDIFS=$IFS

2. Next, set up the pattern and dump your branches; make sure your pattern goes through to the /

   pattern=”Your Grep Pattern Here.*/” svn ls ^/branches | grep -e $pattern | tee branches.log

3. Read the branches dump, tag and drop

   while IFS= read -r line; do echo $line; svn cp ^/branches/$line ^/tags/$line -m”tagging branch $line” && svn rm ^/branches/$line -m”removing the branch $line; refer to the tag instead.”; done < branches.log

4. Cleanup - Restore your IFS

   IFS=$OLDIFS

If you have nested branches under a placeholder, you’ll need to modify those a bit. I addded another variable branchHolder for that purpose, and worked it in on the svn ls $branchHolder and then into the read command:

while IFS= read -r line; do repo="$branchHolder/$line"; svn cp $repo ^/tags/$line -m"tagging branch $repo as tags/$line" && svn rm $repo -m"removing the branch $repo; refer to the tag tags/$line instead."; done < branches.log