I had some kind of ssh error when using subversion. I then did a force quit coz it hung for too long. Then when I started svn again but it kept saying my work directory is locked. I am using osx so I did a “Get Info” on my work directory and toggled the “Locked” checkbox but that didn’t help. Someone said do a recursive “/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a l”, but later on I found out that’s a solution for another problem. The root question here for me is, why does svn think that my work directory is locked?

Answer is, because my work directory has a zero size file called “lock” located at “my_work_dir/.svn/lock”. Once I removed it, snv then went onto another subdirectory to continue its complaint. Yea, so I ended up removing all these “lock” files (literally) to get out of my lock state. I think these lock files were created during my svn sync process, but didn’t get cleaned up since I force quitted.