How to pass a literal asterisk to svn propset on Windows command line and bat file

Question

The goal is to set the following svn property in a .bat file:

Properties on 'logs':
  svn:ignore
    *

The command should be svn propset svn:ignore * logs but the asterisk needs to be escaped somehow. I don't want to add the current list of files I really want to ignore all files in the logs directory without ignoring the logs directory itself.

However I can't figure out how to properly escape the asterisk to get a literal asterisk in the svn property.

• '*' results in the string '*' (with the quotes) to be set as the value which does not ignore any files at all
• "*" or ^* still expands the asterisk causing svn to set a property (with the name of a file in the current directory) on all directories.
• \\* or "\\*" causes SVN to look for a (or all?) files in the root of the C: drive for some reason
• %* results in a value of %*

I can't think of any other way to escape a character in a bat file.

Answer 1

I've come across the same problem you described.
I am on Windows (using TortoiseSVN) and I needed to set a rule in svn:ignore so that all files belonging to certain directories would be ignored.
I used the following command:

svn propset svn:ignore '*' dirname

And then In File Explorer, went to dirname and then: Right Click>Properties>Subversion>Properties.. .
I saw that the value set for property svn:ignore was '*' which didn't worked at all.
I also tried different combinations of asterisks (as you said) but without success.
Then, I tried to use a file-based approach: I created a simple svn.txt file with just one line:

*

Then, after execution of the command:

svn propset svn:ignore -F svn.text dirname

I went to the same menu described before, and now the svn:ignore property for the folder correctly shows the value: * .
Of course, after committing the svn:ignore property modification, every file which is put under dirname is correctly ignored.

Answer 2

I can think of two other ways to try but sadly I cannot verify them myself without further ado...

1. Maybe it is a double caret ^^*

2. You can try to fix it by passing the asterisk as variable inside of your batch file. Example:

@echo off
[...]
set asterisk=*
call svn propset svn:ignore %asterisk% logs
[...]

This should prevent the expansion of the asterisk since the variable %asterisk% must already be expanded and there is no second expansion pass unless you activated ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION somewhere in your command session (with cmd.exe /V:ON or SETLOCAL ).

Remark to your attempt with \\* : This behavior seems totally legit to me, since \\ stands for the root directory of the current drive in UNIX/LINUX. And svn interprets wildcards as implemented in fnmatch on such systems [see redbook on svn:ignore]. This essentially works in Windows also this way. cd \\ will bring you to the first level of the drive and a dir \\*.* will list the files on the first level no matter where you are in the sub directories.

Hope this helps. Good luck with your project :)