Check that an svn repository url does not exist

Question

This should be a really simple question but somehow I cannot find the answer to it. My apologies if I have missed something blindingly obvious.

I am writing a script which will add a new project in the repository, based on the name supplied by the user. Part of this involves checking that an url with the same name does not already exist on the repository.

In the repository, all the projects of our team are stored in

https://developernetwork.repo.net/svn/Projects/

Let's say that the user wants to call the project "Calculator" and runs the script. In this case, we need to ensure that the following does not already exist in the repository

https://developernetwork.repo.net/svn/Projects/Calculator/

Is there an svn command which I can use to accomplish that? Unfortunately I cannot see an appropriate command I can use in the svn documentation (http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/svn-book.html) at all.

Thank you.

Answer 1

You can just use

svn ls https://developernetwork.repo.net/svn/Projects/Calculator/

It will tell you if the repository(directory) exist or not.

Answer 2

To receive information about any existing repository (e.g. for possibly enriching an error message) you could also use

svn info https://developernetwork.repo.net/svn/Projects/Calculator/

For a non-existing project it will just return

svn: Could not open the requested SVN filesystem

Answer 3

Instead of checking for return strings I would just check for the return code:

both

svn ls REPOSITORY/PATH

et

svn info REPOSITORY/PATH

return 0 if all went fine, and 1 if things went wrong; you can quickly check it out:

echo $?

so in a bash script just do something like:

error=$?
if [ $error -ne 0 ]; then
      YOUR ERROR HANDLING
fi

works like a threat!