Subversion stuck due to "previous operation has not finished"?

Running console svn cleanup has solved the same problem for me.


I've been in similar situations. Have you tried running cleanup from the root of your workspace? I know sometimes a cleanup from a child directory (where the problem lies) doesn't work, and cleanup from the root of the workspace does.

If that still fails, since you had deleted a child dir somewhere. Try deleting 1 level higher from the child dir as well (assuming that is not the root), and re-trying update and cleanup.

If cleanup attempts aren't succeeding at any level then the answer is unfortunately checkout a new working copy.


There is often no need for a new checkout or copying.

I have just solved a similar issue relating to the error "previous operation has not finished" with help from this (Link)

It seems that svn sometimes gets stuck while processing commands/operations. All of these operations are stored in the database file wc.db in the .svn folder.

By downloading SQLite to my checkout directory and running

sqlite3.exe .svn/wc.db "select * from work_queue"

you can get a list of all pending operations. These operations are the ones the error is referring to as "not finished".

By running

sqlite3.exe .svn/wc.db "delete from work_queue"

all of the old operations are deleted from the work queue and the error disapears. No need for a new checkout or anything