SVN Windows and ‘._’ Apple double files

While going through and versioning old projects I had to import a fairly large project (6-7 subfolders, hundreds of files). Never mind that they weren’t under version control, they were on a windows machine, and I work via SMB mounts.

Not that I would expect many people to get hung up on this. Editing windows files on a mac apple will sometimes generate a ‘._text.txt’ for a modified ‘text.txt’ file (apple double files).

This shows as an invisible file on the SMB mount. Since I did a straight import, all ‘._*’ files were included in the repository. However ‘_.’ is an illegal file name for a windows machine. So when I tried to svn co or svn up I got the following error on other windows machines.

svn: In directory 'sesame/Images'
svn: Can't open file 'sesame/images/.svn/tmp/text-base/._sesame_50.jpg.svn-base': No such file or directory

Notice the error mentions a file with a ‘._’ prefix. On a windows box I discovered ‘._’ is not part of a valid file name. After removing all of the ‘._’ files from the repository everything works great. Moral of the story: use global-ignores to skip over ‘._*’ files.

Author’s Note

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

Original Wordpress categories: [‘SVN’]

Original Wordpress tags: “SVN”, “data fork”, “mac”

Original Wordpress comments: None

Significant revisions

tags: 2010, wordpress, txcowboycoder, svn, error-messages, mac-programming

May 6th, 2024 Converted to jekyll markdown format and copied to personal site
Oct 28th, 2010 Originally published on txcowboycoder wordpress site