Usually, an svn cleanup fixes most issues with tortoise svn. However, I ran into an issue which caused me some grief.

The specific error I was seeing:

Previous operation has not finished; run ‘cleanup‘ if it was interrupted

Solution: Somehow, svn is stuck on the previous operation. We need to remove this operation from it’s ‘work queue’.

The data is stored in the wc.db sqllite database in the offending folder.

1. Install sqllite (32 bit binary for windows) from here

2. sqlite .svn/wc.db “select * from work_queue”

The SELECT should show you your offending folder/file as part of the work queue. What you need to do is delete this item from the work queue.

3. sqlite .svn/wc.db “delete from work_queue*

That’s it. Now, you can run cleanup again – and it should work. Or you can proceed directly to the task you were doing before being prompted to run cleanup (adding a new file etc.)

Also, svn.exe (a command line tool) is part of the Tortoise installer – but is unchecked for some reason. Just run the installer again, choose ‘modify’ and select the ‘command line tools’.