examining history of deleted file

First, find the revision number where the file got deleted:

svn log -v > log.txt

Then look in log.txt (not an SVN guru, so I don't know a better way) for a line with

D <deleted file>

and see which revision that was. Then, as in the other answers, resurrect the file using the previous revision.

When you want to look at old files you really should know the difference between:

svn cat http://server/svn/project/file -r 1234

and

svn cat http://server/svn/project/file@1234

The first version looks at the path that is now available as http://server/svn/project/file and retrieves that file as it was in revision 1234. (So this syntax does not work after a file delete).

The second syntax gets the file that was available as http://server/svn/project/file in revision 1234. So this syntax DOES work on deleted files.

You can even combine these methods to retrieve a file that was available in revision 2345 as http://server/svn/project/file but with the contents as it had in 1234 with:

svn cat http://server/svn/project/file@2345 -r 1234