When Subversion modifies your working copy (or any information within .svn), it tries to do so as safely as possible. Before changing anything, it writes its intentions to a log file, executes the commands in the log file, then removes the log file (this is similar in design to a journaled filesystem). If a Subversion operation is interrupted (if the process is killed, or if the machine crashes, for example), the log files remain on disk. By re-executing the log files, Subversion can complete the previously started operation, and your working copy can get itself back into a consistent state.

And this is exactly what svn cleanup does: it searches your working copy and runs any leftover logs, removing locks in the process. If Subversion ever tells you that some part of your working copy is “locked”, then this is the command that you should run. Also, svn status will display an L next to locked items:

$ svn status
  L    somedir
M      somedir/foo.c 

$ svn cleanup
$ svn status
M      somedir/foo.c

The svn import command is a quick way to copy an unversioned tree of files into a repository, creating intermediate directories as necessary.

$ svnadmin create /usr/local/svn/newrepos
$ svn import mytree file:///usr/local/svn/newrepos/some/project
Adding         mytree/foo.c
Adding         mytree/bar.c
Adding         mytree/subdir
Adding         mytree/subdir/quux.h

Committed revision 1.

The previous example copied the contents of directory mytree under the directory some/project in the repository:

$ svn ls file:///usr/local/svn/newrepos/some/project
bar.c
foo.c
subdir/

Note that after the import is finished, the original tree is not converted into a working copy. To start working, you still need to svn checkout a fresh working copy of the tree.