Easily Zip Changed Files in Your Subversion Working Copy

Subversion is a great tool for source control on a team of software developers. Every check-in we do into subversion must be accompanied by a code review from a fellow developer. The best method for doing this is to send the modified files to another developer in zip format. But how does one do this with a large source tree?

*nix

From the command line run the following:

svn status | grep ^[AM] | awk '{print $2}' | zip ~/Desktop/cr -@

A small explanation of what's going on here:

• this makes heavy use of piping (aka the | or "pipe" character) which sends the output of a command on the left of the pipe as input to the command on the right. as a short exampe ls -l | grep ^A will send a directory listing to grep will will then evaluate that list and parse out only those entries that start with A (which really will be none...).

• svn status will list all files in your working copy (local sandbox) that are not in sync with the svn repository.

• svn status returns ?, !, A, M, D for "unknown," "file missing," "added," "modified," and "deleted" respectively. it lists this info in column 1 and the file path in column 2.

• we use grep ^[AM] to filter out the list for added and modified files only. it's a regular expression that says find matches where the line starts with A or M. this means the output of svn status | grep ^[AM] will be a list of all added and modified files in your working copy.

• we use awk '{print $2}' to print the 2nd column front standard input. this means that svn status | grep ^[AM] | awk '{print $2}' will list the paths of each file in your svn working copy that has been added or modified.

• zip is the most obvious command in this sequence - it builds a zip file in the location specified. the only odd option is -@ which tells zip to take the list of files to zip from standard input.

I have actually saved this to a bash script to make sure I delete any existing cr.zip.

Windows

Heaven forbid you can actually do something more easily and nearly as geeky on Windows but it's true....

This assumes you use TortoiseSVN which is a stellar program that integrates into the Windows shell.

Right-click on your trunk directory and choose TortoiseSVN => SVN Check for Modifications. This command sends svn status and returns the list to a dialog box. From here you can double-click each file for easy diff.

To zip these files up create a new zip file (on your desktop) with your zip utility of choice (aka WinRar or WinZip - as you'll see in a moment) and open the zip in your utility.

From the TortoiseSVN window select all the files you want to zip (you will have to manually unselect (or not select) deleted, missing, or non-added files which is made easier if you sort by the "text status" column) and drag them to the title bar of your zip utility. With WinRar and WinZip you get a dialog giving you options about how you want to add these files - make sure you select to add the files with full paths or when they are unzipped they'll be all at the root of the zip file.

I have not played with other zip utilities on windows outside of 7z which does give you the option to add files by full path.