Using sed in svn command ignores directory backslashes

Question

I want to check status of files in my SVN working copy and then remove them by svn if they were manually deleted (so they can be committed). i found out that

svn status "C:\\Tools\\Jenkins\\" | grep "^\!" | sed "s/^\! *//g"

correctly finds files i manually deleted, i my case it is jobs\\run_tests_on_master. But when i try to remove the directory using:

svn status "C:\\Tools\\Jenkins\\" | grep "^\!" | sed "s/^\! *//g" | xargs svn rm

I get error:

svn: E155007: 'C:\ToolsJenkinsjobsrun_tests_on_master' is not a working copy

It looks like the directory lacks backslashes. Is there a way to work around it?

Answer 1

The following awk will test every line of svn output to see if it can remove an exclamation mark followed by any spaces from the beginning of that line. If it does so, it will perform svn rm on the resulting string.

svn status 'C:\Tools\Jenkins' |awk 'sub(/^! */, ""){system("svn rm " $0)}'

Answer 2

You can do two things to improve your command: replace the grep + sed combination with a single call to sed (thanks to -n and p flags), and use single quotes in sed . Using echo in place of svn , that would be something like this:

>>> echo '!C  C:\\Tools\\Jenkins\\' | sed -nr 's/!C *//gp'

C:\\Tools\\Jenkins\\

I realised that the problem is with the xargs part of the command. You need to use the -0 option:

>>> echo '!C  C:\\Tools\\Jenkins\\' | sed -nr 's/!C *//gp' | xargs -0 echo

C:\\Tools\\Jenkins\\

This was discussed in Escaping backslash in windows paths passed to unix programs

Answer 3

I did a workaround of the issue, based on the suggested solutions:

1. Store deleted files in txt file

svn status "C:\\Tools\\Jenkins\\" | grep "^\!" | sed "s/^\! *//g" >>file.txt

2. Remove files indicated in file.txt using svn remove command

for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%A in (file.txt) do (svn remove "%%A")