Subversion Working Copy Locked "Fix"

I was working with some old Subversion projects I had on my workstation but it a couple were coming up as "locked." Since I hadn't been working with these particular projects for a long, long time, I had no idea why they were locked. Here's a quick fix:

Problem
Performing an update (in my case) to get the latest files from a Subversion (svn) repository, I got the message that the "Working copy '/path/to/project' locked". The locking of files is done by SVN to prevent multiple copies of files from being edited in multiple places at once. If one user is performing certain tasks on a file, the system sets the file as "locked".

...Well, that's my lame way of explaining it, and it may not be exactly accurate, but you get the idea of the concept of Subversion file/directory locking. For more detailed info, look elsewhere. :)

In my particular case, I have not been working on the project and I don't know or care about anything that would be destroyed by just getting a new current checkout copy from the repository. I've seen notes online where people thought this often happens with interrupted checkout/in functions, among other situations. If the locking is unintended or you want to reverse it, I have a way that worked in my situation.

This Worked!
(Man, this is a long post for such a simple solution, but hey, give me a break! I'm trying real hard here to maintain a consistent format for posting these problem/solution pairs! Hopefully most of you appreciate the effort I'm putting in here.)

Running a "cleanup" command on the project of choice cleared up the problem right away for me. In my case, I'm running Ubuntu Linux as my OS of choice, so my current SVN client is PySVN WorkBench. I think the path to running cleanup is similar on most (all?) clients, but I just right-clicked on the chosen project and selected the "Clean up" option. It chattered away for a bit and came up, well... clean! Lockup problem averted.

As a side note, PySVN WorkBench has a "Reports" menu with a couple options to display "Working Copy Locks..." and "Repository Locks...". You may find yourself wanting to start there in your case, if you actually care about what is locked when you get this error.

Hope it helps!