SVN Error - Not a working copy
If you get a "not a working copy" when doing a recursive svn cleanup my guess is that you have a directory which should be a working copy (i.e. the .svn directory at the top level says so), but it is missing its own .svn directory. In that case, you could try to just remove/move that directory and then do a local update (i.e. rm -rf content; svn checkout content).
If you get a not a working copy error, it means that Subversion cannot find a proper .svn directory in there. Check to see if there is an .svn directory in contents
The ideal solution is a fresh checkout, if possible.
I got into a similar situation (svn: 'papers' is not a working copy directory) a different way, so I thought I'd post my battle story (simplified):
$ svn add papers
svn: Can't create directory 'papers/.svn': Permission denied
Oops! fix permissions... then:
$ svn add papers
svn: warning: 'papers' is already under version control
$ svn st
~ papers
$ svn cleanup
svn: 'papers' is not a working copy directory
And even moving papers out of the way and running svn up (which worked for the OP) didn't fix it. Here's what I did:
$ mv papers papers_
$ svn cleanup
$ svn revert papers
Reverted 'papers'
$ mv papers_/ papers
$ svn add papers
That worked.
I solved it by
- Copy a backup of the impacted folders
- SVN revert the impacted folders
- Paste the files back from the backup
In my case the problem was due to deleted .svn-files.