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At Automattic, we use SVN and Phabricator for much of our source control needs. One issue that I often run into is a warning about untracked files when creating a Phabricator differential:

You have untracked files in this working copy.

  Working copy: ~/public_html

  Untracked changes in working copy:
  (To ignore this change, add it to "svn:ignore".)
    test.txt

    Ignore this untracked file and continue? [y/N]

This warning’s purpose is to make sure that the differential being created has ALL of the changes so that a file isn’t forgotten when a commit is made. 

But, what if the untracked file(s) are from previously checking out and testing a patch? In that case, this warning is actually a bit annoying. 😄

The simple fix is to clear out the file(s) that aren’t tracked by SVN, which is as simple as deleting the file(s) since they’re not tracked in SVN. For a single file, that might look like:

rm test.txt

But, what if there are dozens or hundreds of files? I know I certainly wouldn’t want to run the command above dozens or hundreds of times to remove all of the files that aren’t tracked in SVN. Of course, we can automate all of the work by running something like the following ONCE:

svn st | grep '^?' | awk '{print }' | xargs rm -rf

Simply run the above from the root of the project and the untracked files should be removed. The above command is a bit much, so I’d recommend throwing it in an alias, which would look something like this:

alias clearuntracked='svn st | grep '\''^?'\'' | awk '\''{print }'\'' | xargs rm -rf'