Time saving tricks with svn and grep

We’ve all been there, you’re working on a project with lots of externals and we see a lot of noise when you run svn status or svn st (depending on your preference). Most of the time we just filter that out, but I decided to string a few grep statements together to make the output that little bit nicer to read.

So to start with here is a typical svn status on one of my projects

# svn st
X       lib
X       data
?       batch
X       config/doctrine

Performing status on external item at 'data'
?       data/sql

Performing status on external item at 'config/doctrine'

Performing status on external item at 'lib'

Now you could filter out all of the empty lines with grep -i [a-z0-9] which makes the output

# svn st | grep -i [a-z0-9]
X       lib
X       data
?       batch
X       config/doctrine
Performing status on external item at 'data'
?       data/sql
Performing status on external item at 'config/doctrine'
Performing status on external item at 'lib'

Now this is an improvement, but there is still too much noise for my liking so I then filter out all of the “Performing status on external …” lines and those which start with “X” with another grep statement.

# svn st | grep -i [a-z0-9] | egrep -v ^"Perform|X"
?       batch
?       data/sql

Now this is all well and good, but you will probably want to run this on a regular basis when working on your project so you can put this into a bash file in your local bin directory (e.g. /home/carl/bin).

# echo 'svn st | grep -i $@ [a-z0-9] | egrep -v ^"Perform|X"' > /home/carl/bin/st
# chmod +x /home/carl/bin/st

You’ll notice that the above command has been changed slightly to include $@. This is to allow you to pass file/folder path(s) into the script to restrict subdirectories from the directory you run the script in.

When run on it’s own:

# st
?       batch
?       data/sql

When given a folder name:

# st data
?       data/sql