The Problem

Using svn if you’ve checked out a tree but didn’t want the entire tree how can you get rid of some of the subfolders.  This is generally a problem if there are some really big folder slowing down diff or other operations in the tree.

Example

You have checked out http://server/trunk but there is a gigantic folder that was checked out and you want to remove it from the checkout but not svn continues to annoy you saying that you’ve deleted it. Further if you simply delete the folder it will show as deleted every time run svn diff.

svn co http://server/trunk

Resulting in

trunk/one
trunk/two
trunk/three

The Solution

cd trunk
rm -rf three
svn up -N three

If That Doesn’t Work

rm -rf three
svn update --set-depth empty three

The folder will still be there but it will not cause problems with everyday life.