Often times I find that some unwanted file has ended up in my svn repository, be it some computer specific build files, user preferences or anything else. Usually, these files have to lie within your svn repo even if you don't want svn to track the changes to these files or folders.

Thankfully, there is a way to have svn ignore certain files or folders. These preferences are on a per-directory basis. To tell SVN to ignore a particular file or folder, first navigate to the directory in which the file or folder lies, and type:

svn propedit svn:ignore .

A text editor will open with a file containing everything within that directory that SVN will ignore. Place whatever you like in this file, separating different file or folder names on individual lines. You can use wildcards as well, for example, if you don't want any .txt files to appear in your SVN repo, enter *.txt.

Happy version-controlling!