Failed to run the WC DB work queue associated with file

Without thinking I added and committed a file through my osx system that had a question mark in it not thinking about how this would impact windows. On windows when I did the update it failed because it was unable to create a file with a ? in it so I went back to my osx system and did an svn rename on the file however on windows this did not help since svn goes through the history of all steps to bring a workspace up to the head revision. Needless to say I am stuck, any ideas how I can fix this?

Here is my current svn error log when updating (tried using Tortoise SVN and command line, both are the same):

svn: E155009: Failed to run the WC DB work queue associated with 'F:\Devel\bc\dev\trunk\appShare\media\frontend\?_12x15.png', work item 53314 (file-install appShare/media/frontend/?_12x15.png 1 0 1 1)
svn: E720123: Can't move 'F:\Devel\bc\dev\trunk\.svn\tmp\svn-68A36D23' to 'F:\Devel\bc\dev\trunk\appShare\media\frontend\?_12x15.png': The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.

Each time I do this I have to delete the records in the WORK_QUEUE table in wc.db and then do a cleanup before svn will let me try something else.


Thanks to this reference for a solution that worked on Mac with svn installed via brew.

cd {work-dir-base}
sqlite3 .svn/wc.db "delete from work_queue"

Here is another blog entry dealing with this issue.


These are the steps that I did to get rid of this error

  1. Download sqlite from https://www.sqlite.org/download.html, download the Precompiled Binaries for Windows. I downloaded sqlite-tools-win32-x86-3200100.zip which contains the .exe of sqlite

  2. Extract the zip and add the path where you kept the sqlite3.exe to your windows PATH variable.

  3. Now navigate to the location of your .svn directory

  4. Open in command window and execute the sqlite3 .svn/wc.db "delete from work_queue"

  5. Now go ahead and run your svn cleanup, everything should work fine.


For Windows users.

  1. Copy sqlite3.exe where .svn directory exist.
  2. Open CMD as admin
  3. commands :
    C: sqlite3 .svn\wc.db 
    sqlite> select * from WORK_QUEUE;
    sqlite> delete from WORK_QUEUE;
    sqlite> .quit
    C: svn cleanup