Subversion Power Tip: –parents

Let’s say you want to keep your logwatch configuration, which has a lot of files deep in directory trees, in subversion to track changes you make over time and ease rollouts between machines.

When you want to check in /etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf. Your working directory is /etc, but /logwatch and /logwatch.conf are not yet added. You don’t want to import everything under /etc/logwatch/scripts nor do you want to import anything under the /conf directory besides logwatch.conf.

svn clients >= version 1.5 have a really cool new feature. From an existing working directory, you can run svn add logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf --parents instead of first having to add logwatch with the -N option, conf with the -N option, and then finally logwatch.conf, … makes for a decent time savings.