How Do I Find a File in a Subversion Repository History?

Question

Is it possible to look back through the history of a Subversion repository for files of a certain name (even better would be for them to have a wildcard search)?

I want to see if a .bat file has been committed to the repository at some point in the past but has since been removed in later updates. Even a dump of the file history at each revision would work, as I could just grep the output. I have looked through the manual but could not see a good way to do this.

The logs for each commit are descriptive, so I cannot just look through the log messages to see what modifications were done. I presume Subversion does have a way of retrieving this?

Answer 1

TortoiseSVN can search the logs very easily, and on my system I can enter ".plg" in the search box and find all adds, modifies, and deletes for those files.

Without Tortoise, the only way I can think of doing that would be to grep the full logs or parse the logs and do your own searching for 'A' and 'D' indicators on the file you are looking for (use svn log --verbose to get file paths).

svn log --verbose | grep .bat

Answer 2

I assume you are using the SVN command line client. Give TortoiseSVN a try. Its "Show Log" dialog allows searching for comments, filenames and authors.

http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads

PS: Windows only.

Answer 3

Personally I'd use

svnadmin dump -r1:HEAD /path/to/repo/

Pipe it into less and search or grep with some context.

Answer 4

TortoiseSVN is completely sweet. I can't imagine dealing with Subversion without it.

Also, as a long shot, if you're using Eclipse I'd recommend the Subclipse plug-in.

Answer 5

svn log -v .bat