Sunday, July 08, 2007

Set svn to ignore auxiliary LaTeX files

Using SubVersion for LaTeX document management is great. (See my earlier post on setting this up.) However, there are certain files (.aux, .log, etc.) that are best not put under revision control because they change very often. The following describes how to set svn to ignore these files, so that the output of 'svn status' doesn't report them.

1) Create a file called "ignore-these" with the (patterns of) files you want svn to ignore. For example,
*.aux
*.bbl
*.blg
*.bst
*.dvi
*.idx
*.lof
*.log
*.pdf
*.toc
includeonly.tex
2) Then run the command,
svn -R propset svn:ignore . -F ignore-these
3) Should you need to edit these properties, use the following command.
svn propedit svn:ignore .
(On Mac OS X you need to set the EDITOR variable: 'export EDITOR=vim')