Subversion doesn't track either the state or existence of working copies on the server, so there's no server overhead to keeping working copies around. Likewise, there's no need to let the server know that you're going to delete a working copy.

If you're likely to use a working copy again, there's nothing wrong with just leaving it on disk until you're ready to use it again, at which point all it takes is an svn update to bring it up to date and ready for use.

However, if you're definitely not going to use a working copy again, you can safely delete the entire thing, but you'd be well served to take a look through the working copy for unversioned files. To find these files, run svn status and review any files that are prefixed by a ? to make certain that they're not of importance. After you're done reviewing, you can safely delete your working copy.

当Subversion改变你的工作拷贝（或是.svn中的任何信息），它会尽可能的小心，在修改任何事情之前，它把意图写到日志文件中去，然后执行log文件中的命令，并且执行过程中在工作拷贝的相关部分保存一个锁— 防止Subversion客户端在变更过程中访问工作拷贝。然后删掉日志文件，这与记帐试的文件系统架构类似。如果Subversion的操作中断了（举个例子：进程被杀死了，机器死掉了），日志文件会保存在硬盘上，通过重新执行日志文件，Subversion可以完成上一次开始的操作，你的工作拷贝可以回到一致的状态。

这就是svn cleanup所作的：它查找工作拷贝中的所有遗留的日志文件，删除进程中工作拷贝的锁。如果Subversion告诉你工作拷贝中的一部分已经“锁定”了，你就需要运行这个命令了。同样，svn status将会使用L 标示锁定的项目：

$ svn status
  L    somedir
M      somedir/foo.c

$ svn cleanup
$ svn status
M      somedir/foo.c

Don't confuse these working copy locks with the ordinary locks that Subversion users create when using the “lock-modify-unlock” model of concurrent version control; see “锁定”的三种含义 for clarification.