Today I accidentally gzipped a file and copied it over my original….(I won’t get into how I managed to accomplish this). I hadn’t realized my mistake until I checked in the file into “trunk”.

After a brief moment of panic I had a the original restored, after re-applying my local changes.

Changeset #2301 is the bad file that was committed to trunk erroneously.
Changeset #2300 is the most recent “working version” of the same file.

$ svn merge 2301:2300 ./path/to/file

The arguments are explained better with “svn help merge” display. The command will merge the newer version with the older version for the given file path.

The one problem is that I lost all my local changes on the file. Be sure to check your changes in frequently…if you work on a feature that is not going to be done soon (a day or less)…then perhaps branching will be a good idea so you can retain revision history on files before they are ready for “trunk”.

If you need to save the changes in the file you checked in, prior to reverting (merging) back to the previous version, make a backup of the file that was checked into trunk accidentally.

We will assume you checked in “foo.html” on accident, but still want to keep your changes to the “working copy”:

$ cp foo.html foo.html.new
$ svn merge -r 2301:2300 foo.html
$ svn st
   #=> M foo.html (it is modified -- back to its original state)
$ svn ci -m 'reverting accidental checkin' ./foo.html
$ mv foo.html.new foo.html
$ svn st
   #=> M foo.html (it is modified in your working copy, containing the changes you reverted from trunk)

Now you are back at the original state — a locally modified “foo.html” with the original back in “trunk” where it belongs.