Okay solutions: Since you're dealing with an older version of Subversion, you might find the -N (no-recursive) flag to work better than --depth. Do a "svn co -N" and then go into each of those directories and do a "svn update -N" unless those directories are branches or tags (you skip) or is trunk (you update without the -N flag).
Maybe something like this might work out better for you. Use "svn ls -R" and find the directories you have to checkout: svn ls -R http://myserver/svn/proj | grep "/trunk/$" That's probably faster than using "svn co --depths" a bunch of times. You can then use that list to checkout each of those directories in their own working directory. You'll have a dozen working directories. to get a listing of all the trunks you have to checkout, and then checking out each trunk in its own directory independently of the others. It might work better than checking out proj in a sparse checkout and working your way down to all of the trunks. Completely untested, but you get the idea: svn ls -R $URL | grep "/trunk/$" | while read directory do parent=$(dirname $directory) mkdir -p $parent svn co $URL/$directory $directory done -- David Weintraub qazw...@gmail.com