Q:

Find paths with svn:external properties with certain string?

I've a very large subversion repository, it's about 7 GB in size and holds many many files and directories from different projects.
Now I did some major change to one project structure which is actually a library and I'm using it in quite a few other projects within the same repository. Now the documentations is sparse and I don't know which project actually really used this library as external and I'd like to somehow query the subversion server/repository to return me all directories which have a certain string in the svn:export property so I can adjust them.
Ideally without checking out the whole repository, would turn out problematic due all the branches and tags.
Is that possible somehow in a smart way?
thx

A:

The quick and dirty way, if it's just a few changes, is to use svn propget with the --recursive flag to get the properties, and make the changes manually (this might take a while to return):
svn propget --recursive svn:externals http://your.svn.server/ | grep -B 5

To do this in a more automated fashion you can script it:

recursively retrieve svn:externals for every path in the root 
check out directories whose externals contain the string you're looking for (you can split the path component by filesystem separator and check out each component with depth=immediate if you want to be really selective about what you check out)
make and commit the change

The advantage doing it this way is that because your checkout effectively mirrors your repository (even though it's missing loads of stuff) you can make a single commit at the top level with all the changes made.
HTH.

