Andy Nelsen

Every once in a while I inherit a site that was built in Dreamweaver. I’m not anti-DW by any means. I think it has a great code view, and the Find/Replace function is epic for making mass updates to an existing site.

What I DON’T like is polluting my Subversion repository with old _notes folders generated by DW for template and file synchronization operations. It’s easy enough to delete all of the folders, but that will cause trouble for you when you try to commit and Subversion can’t figure out what happened to the files. Worse yet, an update before committing just plops those folders right back in place.

The solution is to use subversion’s delete function in combination with core shell tools to quickly remove all those files and keep Subversion informed of the changes.

Just cd to the top of your SVN working copy and do:

svn rm  `find . -type d -name _notes` --force

The –force flag is not necessary unless you have accidentally opened your project in DW to do a quick S&R and find that a bunch of unversioned _notes folders have appeared. Using –force just makes sure that you get both versioned and unversioned instances without any warnings.