examining history of deleted file

Question

If I delete a file in Subversion, how can I look at it\'s history and contents? If I try to do svn cat or svn log on a nonexistent file, it complai

Answer 1

First, find the revision number where the file got deleted:

svn log -v > log.txt

Then look in log.txt (not an SVN guru, so I don't know a better way) for a line with

D <deleted file>

and see which revision that was. Then, as in the other answers, resurrect the file using the previous revision.

Answer 2

To get the log of a deleted file, use

svn log -r lastrevisionthefileexisted

If you want to resurrect the file and keep its version history, use

svn copy url/of/file@lastrevisionthefileexisted -r lastrevisionthefileexisted path/to/workingcopy/file

If you just want the file content but unversioned (e.g., for a quick inspection), use

svn cat url/of/file@lastrevisionthefileexisted -r latrevisionthefileexisted > file

In any case, DO NOT use 'svn up' to get a deleted file back!

Answer 3

When you want to look at old files you really should know the difference between:

svn cat http://server/svn/project/file -r 1234

and

svn cat http://server/svn/project/file@1234

The first version looks at the path that is now available as http://server/svn/project/file and retrieves that file as it was in revision 1234. (So this syntax does not work after a file delete).

The second syntax gets the file that was available as http://server/svn/project/file in revision 1234. So this syntax DOES work on deleted files.

You can even combine these methods to retrieve a file that was available in revision 2345 as http://server/svn/project/file but with the contents as it had in 1234 with:

svn cat http://server/svn/project/file@2345 -r 1234

Answer 4

If you're wanting to look at the history of a file prior to it being renamed, then as mentioned in a comment here you can use

git log --follow -- current_file_name

Answer 5

I wanted an answer, myself. Try the following to output only deletes from svn log.

svn log --stop-on-copy --verbose [--limit <limit>] <repo Url> | \
awk '{ if ($0 ~ /^r[0-9]+/) rev = $0 }
  { if ($0 ~ /^ D /) { if (rev != "") { print rev; rev = "" }; print $0 } }'

This filters the log output through awk. awk buffers each revision line it finds, outputting it only when a delete record is found. Each revision is only output once, so multiple deletes in a revision are grouped together (as in standard svn log output).

You can specify a --limit to reduce the amount of records returned. You may also remove the --stop-on-copy, as needed.

I know there are complaints about the efficiency of parsing the whole log. I think this is a better solution than grep and its "cast a wide net" -B option. I don't know if it is more efficient, but I can't think of an alternative to svn log. It's similar to @Alexander Amelkin's answer, but doesn't need a specific name. It's also my first awk script, so it might be unconventional.

Answer 6

The poster has actually asked 3 questions here:

1. How do I look at the history of a deleted file in Subversion?
2. How do I look at the contents of a deleted file in Subversion?
3. How do I resurrect a deleted file in Subversion?

All the answers I see here are for questions 2 and 3.

The answer to question 1 is:

svn log http://server/svn/project/file@1234

You still need to get the revision number for when the file last existed, which is clearly answered by others here.