svn errors out strangely

Question

unknown command: 'svn-commit.tmp'

I have never seen this type of output from svn ci. svn ci is just an alias for svn commit. Anyway, if you know how to fix this, that would be amazing. Until then, I cannot commit any code lol. I looked around on Google for others having this error but I didn't find anything.

Running svn cleanup doesn't fix anything

Answer 1

The EDITOR or SVN_EDITOR env variables should reference a text editor, like /usr/bin/vi, /usr/bin/emacs, or /usr/bin/nano (fully qualified path to prevent another Mac svn related bug).

From your reply to Richard, you state your .bash_profile looks like this:

export SVN_EDITOR=svn

In this case, svn ci tries to launch the following:

$ svn svn-commit.tmp
Unknown command: 'svn-commit.tmp'
Type 'svn help' for usage.

and there is your "Unknown command" message.

Answer 2

I did resolve it and in my opinion it might be helpful to other users at some point in the future.

I tried svn ci somefile -m "my comment" thereby only committing a single file and making my comment part of the commit message. This removed the strange behavior from SVN. I have been using SVN since 2007 and have never seen this before but I also never had a Mac before. Anyway, I do think this is a valid issue

Answer 3

Could it be that the EDITOR (or SVN_EDITOR, etc.) environment variable is set to svn-commit.tmp? (This environment variable specifies which editor you want to use to edit the commit message.)

Though on Linux, at least, you would get a more meaningful error message:

sh: svn-commit.tmp: not found
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: system('svn-commit.tmp svn-commit.tmp') returned 32512

Perhaps you are on Windows, this is the problem, and the error message is terse?