Options: Episode-1

Options are command modifiers. They modify the way the svn command would otherwise act by default. There are 2 kinds of options. They are:
1.Short options: Short options are a single hyphen followed by a single letter.
E.g.: -N (Do not recurs), -m (message). Etc.
2.Long options: Long options consists of two hyphens followed by a number of letters.
E.g.: --non-recursive(Do not recurs), --message(message). Etc.

All options have a long format, but only certain options have additional short formats. These are typically those options which are more frequently used.

In the following section I describe all the available options in svn:

--auto-props and --no-auto-props:

Subversion stores the mime-type of all the files automatically. This is stored in the “svn:mime-type” property.
E.g:
*.txt = svn:mime-type=text/plain

To set this, the user has to enable the auto-prop option in the subversion config file:
enable-auto-props = yes
If the user do not want Subversion to automatically store the mime-types of the file, then he could do that by overriding the config file property by the option “--no-auto-props”. If the property is not set in the config file and the user wants the Subversion to store the mime-types of the file automatically then he could use “--auto-props” option.
You all could be thinking why does the user wants to set the mime type of the file manually when Subversion can do the same for us automatically. To answer this question you should first understand how Subversion sets the mime-type of the file.
Subversion just looks first 1024 bytes in the file to decide its mime-type! To understand how it effects lets take the example of how Subversion classifies a file as binary. If any of the bytes are zero, or if more than 15% are not ASCII printable characters, then It decides the file as Binary!! This logic applies well for most of the files. But if user has a file which satisfies the above condition but is not a Binary file, then he could choose to store the mime-type manually.

--config-dir The Subversion by default reads the configuration information “.subversion” in the user's home directory. If the user creates his own configuration file in a different directory, then he can tell subversion to read configuration information from that directory using this command. The user should give the directory path and not the file path for this command.