SVN Weirdness Day 2: SVN List and SVN Update Report Different Things

Question

In a subdirectory of my svn working copy, I do

svn list

I see that there are 6 files in the repository (same as I see with SVNX). Nice. But in my working copy, there are two files, which are from some historical point that I do not remember. So I do

svn update

and it says that all files are up to date to revision 122 (which is the head revision). How can there be a difference between doing an update and a list? More importantly, how can I get those files back without doing a fresh checkout?

I know that the answer will either reveal that I'm a complete newbie OR that svn is a terrible kludge. Personally, I just want to get back to work.

Edit: svn cleanup does nothing at all, and svn status reports nothing at all.

Edit: Here's exactly what I did, since one of the commenters asked.

root@Dans-13:/dans-data/php/nasa-secrets-revealed/trunk/images/testmenu$svn update
At revision 122.
root@Dans-13:/dans-data/php/nasa-secrets-revealed/trunk/images/testmenu$svn list
graph-big0.gif
graph-big1.gif
graph-big2.gif
graph0.gif
graph1.gif
graph2.gif
root@Dans-13:/dans-data/php/nasa-secrets-revealed/trunk/images/testmenu$ls
.svn        graph-big0.gif  graph0.gif

Answer 1

You might have a sparse checkout. Try

svn update --depth infinity --set-depth infinity

Answer 2

Is there a svn:ignore property set up in the directory?

svn pg svn:ignore .

Answer 3

From what I know of SVN, this is completely impossible and should not happen.

Eventually I ended up doing this: Delete the entire directory from level up and run svn update. Sometimes, the answer is to walk around the problem.

Answer 4

Or maybe you have done svn switch or svn update -r X in that working copy folder. The output from svn:info could tell you that.