SVN pushing changes

Correct, svn commit will push your local modifications to the server. Take a look at the Basic Work Cycle to get a quick-ish overview of the commands you'll typically use.

The "common" pattern is:

1. update to merge the latest changes from the server into your working copy;
2. Perform whatever modifications you need to do;
3. update again to make sure you're up to date (you can skip this and the next step will fail if you're not up to date);
4. commit to push your changes to the server.

SVN doesn't have a staging area; there's just your working copy and the repository (plus your local pristine, but you only interact with that indirectly when you revert any working copy changes).

As a side note, Git and SVN have an awful set of terminology that can overlap when not expected (see revert and checkout). Check out this resource for some help with that.

For anyone else who hit's this thread. If your commit message uses single quotes, it will fail silently, e.g.

svn commit -m 'commit message'

will not error but will not do anything either.