How do you see recent SVN log entries?

Typing svn log spits out an incredibly long, useless list on a command line. I have no idea why that is the default. If I wanted to read (or even could read) 300 entries on the terminal, I wouldn't mind typing svn log --full or something similar.

Perhaps the SVN guys are thinking I wanted to feed that output to another program. However, if that is the case, it would make more sense to have the more verbose call for the program - not the terminal user.

Anyway, how do I see just some recent activity like the last 5 or 10 entries to see what changed?

limit option, e.g.:

svn log --limit 4

svn log -l 4

Only the last 4 entries

Besides what Bert F said, many commands, including log has the -r (or --revision) option. The following are some practical examples using this option to show ranges of revisions:

To list everything in ascending order:

svn log -r 1:HEAD

To list everything in descending order:

svn log -r HEAD:1

To list everything from the thirteenth to the base of the currently checked-out revision in ascending order:

svn log -r 13:BASE

To get everything between the given dates:

svn log -r {2011-02-02}:{2011-02-03}

You can combine all the above expressions with the --limit option, so that can you have a quite granular control over what is printed. For more info about these -r expressions refer to svn help log or the relevant chapter in the book Version Control with Subversion

I like to use -v for verbose mode.
It'll give you the commit id, comments and all affected files.

svn log -v --limit 4

Example of output:

I added some migrations and deleted a test xml file
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r58687 | mr_x | 2012-04-02 15:31:31 +0200 (Mon, 02 Apr 2012) | 1 line Changed
paths: 
A /trunk/java/App/src/database/support    
A /trunk/java/App/src/database/support/MIGRATE    
A /trunk/java/App/src/database/support/MIGRATE/remove_device.sql
D /trunk/java/App/src/code/test.xml

Pipe the output through less or other pager:

svn log | less

In case anybody is looking at this old question, a handy command to see the changes since your last update:

svn log -r $(svn info | grep Revision | cut -f 2 -d ' '):HEAD -v

LE (thanks Gary for the comment)
same thing, but much shorter and more logical:

svn log -r BASE:HEAD -v