How can svn co give a "directory already exists error"?

Question

svn co svn+ssh://myhost/path/projectname/trunk projectname

[...]

svn: Failed to add directory 'projectname/test/.svn': an unversioned 
  directory of the same name already exists

How is that possible??

I'm checking out into an empty dir.

Same error checking out to Windows and OS X.

Answer 1

Are you sure it is empty and that .svn doesn't exist? Have you tried not giving it projectname and instead moving into that dir and checking it out?

Answer 2

If you're absolutely certain that the directory you're checking out into is empty, you may want to see if the repository contains directories with the same name using different capitalization. This sometimes happens when the host OS for the repository is Linux. Sometimes this causes problems when the working directory FS isn't case-sensitive.

Answer 3

If you've previously checked out into this directory, there could be a hidden .svn folder (folders prefixed with dot are the equivalent of hidden in Linux/OSX)?

Does the same problem occur in another recently created folder?

Answer 4

I may have seen this problem before when somebody had committed the .svn directory itself to the repository. Thus, when trying to create the working directory, the versioned .svn directory couldn't be created because the working directory already had its own .svn directory.