how do I remove an existing changelist from SVN

Solution 1:

Remove all the associated files from a changelist and it'll disappear.

Official way

See https://stackoverflow.com/a/15992735/253468

svn changelist --remove --recursive --cl my_changes .

Manual way

i.e. svn changelist --remove file.name

D:\Programming>mkdir test
D:\Programming>cd test
D:\Programming\test>svnadmin create .
D:\Programming\test>svn co file:///D:\Programming\test co
Checked out revision 0.
D:\Programming\test>cd co
D:\Programming\test\co>echo "hello" > test.file
D:\Programming\test\co>svn add test.file
A       test.file

D:\Programming\test\co>svn status
A       test.file

D:\Programming\test\co>svn changelist mycl test.file
A [mycl] test.file

D:\Programming\test\co>svn status
--- Changelist 'mycl':
A       test.file

D:\Programming\test\co>svn changelist --remove test.file
D [mycl] test.file

D:\Programming\test\co>svn status
A       test.file

Automation in Bash

# Remove all files from a specific CL
# Usage: svn_remove_cl my_changes
function svn_remove_cl() {
    svn status |\
    sed -n "/--- Changelist '$1':/,/--- Changelist.*/p" |\
    grep -v '^--- Changelist' |\
    awk '{print $2}' |\
    xargs svn changelist --remove
}

Explanation:

svn status: output all the modified files
sed: find the changelist and take the output after the CL title until the next CL or the end of svn status's output
grep: remove the CL titles from the buffer
awk: remove the file statuses, keep only the filenames (i.e. the second column)
xargs: put each line as an argument to svn changelist
(may need tweaks if you have spaces or special characters in the filenames)

Example run

~/tmp/wc$ svn status
A       d

--- Changelist 'cl_a':
A       a
A       e
A       f

--- Changelist 'cl_x':
A       b
A       c
~/tmp/wc$ svn_remove_cl cl_x
Path 'b' is no longer a member of a changelist.
Path 'c' is no longer a member of a changelist.
~/tmp/wc$ svn status
A       b
A       c
A       d

--- Changelist 'cl_a':
A       a
A       e
A       f

Solution 2:

If you want to delete just one changelist (e.g. my_changes) move to the top level folder of your working copy and run:

svn changelist --remove --recursive --cl my_changes .

Solution 3:

For those that are wondering, you can do this with a single command with svn. Simply navigate to the to level directory of files under your change list exist and run:

svn changelist --remove --recursive .

This will loop over all files under the current directory and attempt to disassociate them from the change list.