svn: Argument list too long

Recently I needed to add thousands of files to an existing repository, but every time I tried svn add * or the svn import functionality I got the error:

svn: Argument list too long

I finally found help with a post on how to add multiple files to subversion but it did not work with file names with spaces.

So below I take the substring of the output in spaces and ? from the whole line before adding the file.

svn status | grep "^?" | awk '{ print substr($0,9,length($0))}' | while read f; do svn add "$f"; done

I’m sure more can be done to make this better, but this did the job I needed. For example using ls to import to svn would be helpful. For now this only works when svn status can be executed.

I think find is the best way to do this, with regex support; but again I just hacked my way to the finish line.

Significant Revisions

  • May 6th, 2024 Converted to jekyll markdown format and copied to personal site
  • Nov 29th, 2010 Originally published on txcowboycoder wordpress site1

Footnotes

  1. Initial md Generated using https://github.com/jsr6720/wordpress-html-scraper-to-md

    Original Wordpress categories: [‘SVN’]

    Original Wordpress tags: “SVN”, “svn add”, “terminal” ↩