Mind Wanderings and Various Other Bull

It's actually pretty easy to screw up your source tree:

1. Update your source tree.
   $ svn up


2. Notice that the permissions are set to use your user — and set them to use the Apache user
   $ sudo chown -R [apache user] .


3. Wait a few weeks, and attempt to update your source tree.
   $ svn up
   foo/.svn/lock': Permission denied

Fortunately, I had a job interview a few months ago where I was asked how to fix a whole fsckload of files. I answered, "...write a script," but the answer they wanted was "use a Bash for loop." So rarely do you learn something useful from a job interview.

The next challenge came in how to fix the myriad of directories — but only those associated with subversion. I started off by attempting svn up and fixing the directories. That got old really fast.

So I started searching. After a few false starts, I came up with the following:

1. Get a list of subversion directories, write to a file:
   $ find . -path '*/.svn' -type d > files


2. As superuser, execute a for loop on each file listed in files
   $ for file in `cat files`;do chown -R [proper user] $file; done


3. As normal user, test: attempt to update source tree
   $ svn up

...And that was all.

(bloody hell!)

Labels: bash, find, for, linux