Set svn:ignore recursively for a directory structure

Question

I have imported a huge hierarchy of maven projects into IntelliJ idea, now idea has created .iml projects on all different levels. I would like to svn:ignore these files.

There are several similar questions, for example this one: svn (subversion) ignore specific file types in all sub-directories, configured on root?

However: the answer is always to apply svn:ignore with the --recursive flag. That's not what I am looking for, I just want to ignore the files I created, not set a property on the hundreds of directories underneath.

Basically, what I have is the output of

svn status | grep .iml

which looks like this:

?       foo/bar/bar.iml
?       foo/baz/phleem.iml
?       flapp/flapp.iml

etc.

What I would like to do is for each entry dir/project.iml to add svn:ignore *.iml to dir. I am guessing I have to pipe the above grep to sed or awk and from there to svn, but I am at a total loss as to the exact sed or awk command on one hand and the exact svn command (with which I won't override existing svn:ignore values) on the other hand.

Update: what I am also not looking for are solutions based on find, because possibly there are projects in this hierarchy where .iml files are in fact committed and I wouldn't want to interfere with those projects, so I'm looking to add the property only for .iml files my IDE has created.

Answer 1

You can set up your client to globally ignore given file extensions. Just add

global-ignores = *.iml

into your Subversion config file.

Update: If you want to only ignore iml files in the directories involved, you can try

svn status | grep '^\?.*\.iml' | sed 's=^? *=./=;s=/[^/]*$==' | xargs svn propset svn:ignore '*.iml'