Cant delete a local copy of SVN

Question

When I try to delete a few leftover artifacts of a SVN repository locally in order to delete the whole repository, it is not possible because I get:

• "cannot delete(file in .SVN directory) the file name you specified is not valid or too long"

But when I go to look at the file and delete it individually its like the file doesn't truly exist, there are not options like copy,past,delete...just a left over icon artifact, but I cant delete it(or the root folder of it).

I tried running cleanup, update nothing seems to work...short of renaming the directory to myrepos_crap and just starting over.

Answer 1

This can happen when the total path to the file, plus its name is too long for Windows. Try renaming some of the top directories to something shorter and retrying the deletion.

I'm assuming you're on Windows because I don't think Linux has this problem and you mention tortoisesvn.

Edit: oh, and also not a programming question - belongs on SU.