It is not the file it is the directory It happens on multiple different OSs (at least Linux and OSX) On all of them it happens only in ~/.subversion
-- Alan ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexey Neyman" <sti...@att.net> To: users@subversion.apache.org Cc: "Alan Brogan" <abro...@altobridge.com> Sent: Thursday, 4 March, 2010 17:57:05 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal Subject: Re: Could not un- and re- link ~/.subversion/config "File exists" error means that the file is re-created after you delete it but before 'ln'. The fact that you were able to achieve re-linking by combining two commands into one (rm ... && ln ...) suggests that there is something invoking 'svn' periodically (cron job?). As far as I know, Subversion does not have any special logic for config file protection. However, it does re-create this file with default settings if it does not find one when 'svn' command is invoked. Regards, Alexey. On Thursday 04 March 2010 05:13:49 am Alan Brogan wrote: > Hello the list, > > I just lost a few hours trying to do this: > > $ cd ~/.subversion > $ rm -f config > $ ln -s /path/to/another/config . > > The link command kept failing, because "File exists" > WTF ? > > Turns out I cannot remove ~/.subversion/* in one command, as some other > process is protecting them from deletion (but not from editing). > > Eventually I did figure out the workaround, which is simply to join > them into one command $ rm -f config && ln -s /path/to/another/config . > > But it was a £*({ing annoying few hours between problem arising and > finding solution (and even more annoying that the solution was so > simple) > > I can find no documentation of this feature at > http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/ > http://subversion.apache.org/faq.html > http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/subversion-users/ > so, I would like to ask: > > a) where is it documented ? > b) can it be extended to other user-configurable directories ? > > Thank you for reading this far, and any writing you might be able to > do.