How do I really get the current revision in SVN?

Question

I made a simple script to have my current revision copied to clipboard. At least that's what I thought I did after I used this post: Current Subversion revision command

But as you can see in the image, what the command gives is not the revision number of the current branch at all. So how do I really get the revision number of the branch via a command?

Answer 1

So the actual command that I'm using and that is the only one that works for me to get current revision is this one:

svn info --revision HEAD --show-item last-changed-revision

Answer 2

tl;dr:

Use the COMMITTED alias instead of HEAD

Details:

The most direct way to get the revision at the "tip" of the current branch is to use the COMMITTED alias instead of HEAD (it's amazing that I wasn't aware of the COMMITTED alias for so long).

Git uses HEAD to refer to the tip of the current branch.

Subversion uses HEAD to refer to the tip of the entire repository - not the current branch for the workspace. Subversion uses the COMMITTED alias for that.

svn info shows both pieces of information:

        C:>svn info
        Path: .
        Working Copy Root Path: --elided--
        URL: svn:--elided--
        Relative URL: ^--elided--
        Repository Root: svn:--elided--
        Repository UUID: dcba06d3-f740-481d-b6cf-80debfe3ba96
1) ---> Revision: 40018
        Node Kind: directory
        Schedule: normal
        Last Changed Author: mike
2) ---> Last Changed Rev: 40013
        Last Changed Date: 2022-06-15 08:06:48 -0700 (Wed, 15 Jun 2022)

• #1 is the tip of the repository
• #2 is the tip of the current workspace's branch

If you just want the commit ID:

C:>svn info -r HEAD --show-item revision
40018

C:>svn info -r COMMITTED --show-item revision
40013

And if you want the log information, note that asking for HEAD will give you nothing (unless HEAD == COMMITTED). Asking for COMMITTED will show exactly what you want:

C:>svn log -r HEAD
------------------------------------------------------------------------

C:>svn log -r COMMITTED
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r40013 | mike | 2022-06-15 08:06:48 -0700 (Wed, 15 Jun 2022) | 17 lines

    -- remainder of log message elided --

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Answer 3

If you don't specify a target for svn info then it defaults to '.' which is gonna be your working copy path.

Also from svn help info:

TARGET may be either a working-copy path or a URL. If specified, REV determines in which revision the target is first looked up; the default is HEAD for a URL or BASE for a WC path.

This means, if you want the HEAD revision then you have to specify the URL of your repository:

svn info URL-of-repo --show-item revision

Note that this is only how svn info works by default, you can always specify your own revision argument:

svn info --revision HEAD --show-item revision

On the other hand you can also use svn status -u to get the HEAD revision like so:

svn status -u | awk '{ print $NF }'