Sep 16, 2010

Subclipse / SVN Working copy locked - Solution

Problem

I could not update or commit a certain folder in my subversion project using subclipse in eclipse.

Symptoms

Both commit and update failed with the error:

svn: Working copy 'path/to/folder/that/was/not/working' locked; try performing 'cleanup'

I also got warnings that the directory was not under version control.

To get this problem, I had copied files from one project to another (in the file system not in subclipse). Although I deleted the .svn directory after copying, I still ran into this issue.

Solution

On the command line, cd to the project directory and run svn cleanup as in:

cd path/to/folder/that/was/not/working
svn cleanup

The problem should go away!

2 comments:

  1. I think why it happens, because when you open Open Office file, for example, it leaves a .~fileName copy. So when you commit the file and the .~fileName is not removed, it will lock the the file in repository. You need to make sure that the .~fileName copy doesn't exist before committing. So remove that .~... copy and recommit the file.

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  2. That makes sense—that maybe there were other hidden files somewhere, ruining everything.

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