When you are writing documents using latex you probably noticed that there are many auxiliary (like .toc, .aux, .out) files that are created when you compile your document. These files are very important, but they are also temporary, so you may not want to keep them under your version control.

If you are using subversion (svn), there is a simple and effective way to ignore them and consequently they will not appear as unversioned when you type “svn st”

To do that, you can easily set the svn:ignore property to ignore those files and stop uploading unnecessary to you svn server. To set this property, open a terminal and type:

$ svn propedit svn:ignore /path/to/folder

When you press ENTER, your default editor will be opened, and you will be able to write the files that you want to be ignored. In our case, we will add the extensions of the latex auxiliary files as follows:

*.bl
*.bbl
*.backup
*.pdf
*.dvi
*.blg
*.out
*.log
*.ps
*.aux
*.bl
*.lot
*.lof
*.toc
*.bak
*.snm
*.nav

After that, just save the file and commit

svn commit -m "setting up the ignore property"

Now, everything you want to check the status of your files, you won’t see that huge list of auxiliar files that are not (and don’t need to be) under  version control.

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