One of the more annoying things about svn is that (to my knowledge), there exists no single simple command to retrieve the revision number from a shell.
What I want:
ammon@hermes:~/repo$ svn info --get-revision . 1234
But of course, nothing like this exists.
Thankfully, svn info’s output IS easy enough to parse. You just have to do it your self.
ammon@hermes:~/repo$ svn info | grep Revision | awk -- '{print $2}'
1234
Will give you the revision of your current checkout without the network hit of a call to svn log.
To get the current version of the repo itself (hits the network), add “-r HEAD” to the svn info call:
ammon@hermes:~/repo$ svn info -r HEAD | grep Revision | awk -- '{print $2}'
1280
Of course, svn info also supports outputting info as xml, so you could use that to parse things in a more advanced environment but one where you’re still not using the svn api bindings.