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

I wrote a php script that copies the svn log of all my repositories into a mysql database. I can now do full text searches on my comments or names of files.

Answer 2

Ah, since I am learning to use Bazaar, it is something I tried. Without success, it appears you cannot log and annotate removed files currently... :-(

Tried:

> bzr log -r 3 Stuff/ErrorParser.hta
bzr: ERROR: Path does not have any revision history: Stuff/ErrorParser.hta

but curiously (and fortunately) I can do:

> bzr cat -r 3 Stuff/ErrorParser.hta

and:

> bzr diff -r 2..3 Stuff/ErrorParser.hta

and as suggested in the bug above:

> bzr log -v | grep -B 1 ErrorParser

(adjust -B (--before-context) parameter as needed).

Answer 3

In addition to Dustin's answer, if you just want to examine the contents, and not check it out, in his example you can do:

$ git show 8d4a1f^:slosh.tac

the : separates a revision and a path in that revision, effectively asking for a specific path at a specific revision.

Answer 4

Assume your file was named as ~/src/a/b/c/deleted.file

cd ~/src/a/b/c  # to the directory where you do the svn rm or svn mv command
#cd ~/src   # if you forget the correct directory, just to the root of repository
svn log -v | grep -w -B 9 deleted.file | head  # head show first 10 lines

sample output, found it at r90440

...
r90440 | user | 2017-02-03 11:55:09 +0800 (Fri, 03 Feb 2017) | 4 lines
Changed paths:
  M /src/a/b/c/foo
  M /src/a/b/c/bar
  D /src/a/b/c/deleted.file

copy it back to previous version(90439=90440-1)

svn cp URL_of_deleted.file@90439 .

Answer 5

You can find the last revision which provides the file using binary search. I have created a simple /bin/bash script for this:

function svnFindLast(){
 # The URL of the file to be found
 local URL="$1"
 # The SVN revision number which the file appears in (any rev where the file DOES exist)
 local r="$2"
 local R
 for i in $(seq 1 "${#URL}")
  do
   echo "checkingURL:'${URL:0:$i}'" >&2
   R="$(svn info --show-item revision "${URL:0:$i}" 2>/dev/null)"
   echo "R=$R" >&2
   [ -z "$R" ] || break
 done
 [ "$R" ] || {
  echo "It seems '$URL' is not in a valid SVN repository!" >&2
  return -1
 }
 while [ "$r" -ne "$R" -a "$(($r + 1))" -ne "$R" ]
 do
  T="$(($(($R + $r)) / 2))"
  if svn log "${URL}@${T}" >/dev/null 2>&1
   then
    r="$T"
    echo "r=$r" >&2
   else
    R="$T"
    echo "R=$R" >&2
  fi
 done
 echo "$r"
}