How can I force subversion to commit an unchanged file?

pcorcoran picture pcorcoran · Oct 15, 2008 · Viewed 58.3k times · Source

I want subversion to commit a file even if it's unchanged. Is there a way to do this?

Answer

Andrew Edgecombe picture Andrew Edgecombe · Oct 16, 2008

If you want the file contents to remain unchanged (meaning that you can't merely change whitespace as johnstok suggested) you can always change one of the properties on the file.

eg.

svn propset dummyproperty 1 yourfile
svn commit yourfile

That will perform a commit without having to change the file.

Just make sure that you don't use one of the special svn: properties. Anything else should be ok.


Edit: A number of other posters have asked why someone would want to do this - presumably the people who have marked this answer down have also had the same concerns.

I can't speak for the original poster, but one scenario where I have seen this used is when attempting to automatically synchronise activities on a Visual Sourcesafe repository with a subversion repository.