how to switch folder to symlink in svn

I had a folder that was part of one project in svn, that has been moved to a diffe开发者_JS百科rent folder / repository to be shared between projects. i want to replace this directory in svn w/ a symlink, but when I try to do so, I get this message:

svn: Entry '/project/wwwdocs/js' has unexpectedly changed special status

how can I replace this directory with a symlink?

The following sets the special property on every symlink and deletes it on normal files/directories. There are various ways to the determine the files to operate on.

svn_special_files=`svn propget --recursive svn:special | cut -d' ' -f1`
for i in `find . | grep -v "\.svn" | cut -d'/' -f2-`; do
  is_special=false
  for j in $svn_special_files; do 
    if [ "$j" = "$i" ]; then 
      is_special=true; 
      break; 
    fi
  done
  if [ -h $i ] ; then
    ! $is_special && svn propset svn:special '*' $i
  else
    $is_special && svn propdel svn:special $i
  fi
done

In order for subversion to pick up the changes and detect the symlink, you need to first remove the original file, commit the deletion, and then update your repository. After that you should be able to add a symlink without any issues.

EDIT: This question seems to have been asked before and received some decent feedback. Check it out: Commit symlink into subversion

You can even try a simple answer of removing culprit file -

svn remove --force <file>

This is especially helpful for Windows users using SVN cli.

You could execute command blow to fix this problem.

svn propset svn:special on /project/wwwdocs/js