in svn is there a way to get changes to only those files that I have not modified in my working dir?

I can do svn status -u to get a list of all the changes. But I am leery of doing an update right away, when I am in the middle of something and I don't know if the change that I get will mess up my code.

At the very least I would like to know what files will be automatically merged. So I can go examine them after an update.

Will looking at svn status -u for files with first column M (locally modified) and a * (newer version exists in subversion repo) give me what I want ?

What do you do for this ?

See this Update from svn without merging automatically

Basically you need to provide a diff script that always return false, which marks all locally changed files as conflicted

I use the following rules with SVN. 1. Root is always clean. 2. When you have changes create a branch, and work on that branch. Once the branch has been coded, this is were we normally send it to our tester, from there the branch gets merged back into trunk, this way trunk is always clean.

If you merge files and anything has changed that causes exceptions, you can use the Resolved function in SVN to check any exceptions.