If you delete a directory from a SVN working copy, but haven't commited yet, it's not obvious how to get it back. Google even suggests "svn undo delete before commit" as a common query when you type "svn undo d", but the search results are unhelpful.
edit: I'd like a solution that works in subversion 1.4.4
The simplest solution I could find was to delete the parent directory from the working copy (with rm -rf, not svn delete), and then run svn update in the grandparent. Eg, if you deleted a/b/c, rm -rf a/b, cd a, svn up. That brings everything back. Of course, this is only a good solution if you have no other uncommitted changes in the parent directory that you want to keep.
Hopefully this page will be at the top of the results next time I google this question. It would be even better if someone suggested a cleaner method, of course.
Do a (recursive) Revert operation from a level above the directory you deleted.
svn revert deletedDirectory
Here's the documentation for the svn revert command.
If deletedDirectory was deleted using rmdir and not svn rm, you'll need to do
svn update deletedDirectory
instead.
1) do
svn revert . --recursive
2) parse output for errors like
"Failed to revert 'dir1/dir2' -- try updating instead."
3) call svn up for each of error directories:
svn up dir1/dir2