SVN Cleanup problem. 2013, August.

Today I encountered the problem described here:

svn cleanup failed–previous operation has not finished; run cleanup if it was interrupted

Usually, an svn cleanup fixes most issues with tortoise svn. However, I ran into an issue that caused me some grief. 

The specific error I was seeing:

Previous operation has not finished; run 'cleanup' if it was interrupted

Solution:

Somehow, svn is stuck on the previous operation. We need to remove this operation from it’s ‘work queue’. 
The data is stored in the wc.db sqllite database in the offending folder.
  • 1. Install sqllite (32 bit binary for windows) from here
  • 2. sqlite .svn/wc.db “select * from work_queue”
  • The SELECT should show you your offending folder/file as part of the work queue. What you need to do is delete this item from the work queue.
  •      3. sqlite .svn/wc.db “delete from work_queue”
  • That’s it. Now, you can run cleanup again – and it should work. Or you can proceed directly to the task you were doing before being prompted to run cleanup (adding a new file etc.)
  • Also, svn.exe (a command-line tool) is part of the Tortoise installer – but is unchecked for some reason. Just run the installer again, choose ‘modify’ and select the ‘command line tools’.