None of these answers was satisfactory for my situation. I'm on subversion 1.8 and I had a working copy that only had a single .svn
folder at the very first folder, root. However, I wanted to remove some branches from working copy.
No matter what I did, whenever I ran an 'update' it would restore those files and bring them all back. I didn't want to remove them from the repository, just from my computer -- but I needed to keep the rest of the working copy in tact (thus couldn't just remove the .svn folder).
Solution? svn update --set-depth exclude <dir>
This is a client-side "update" that excludes a specific directory. It can be found in the manuals at svnbook.com. In short, it describes this as:
Beginning with Subversion 1.6, you can take a different approach. First, check out the directory in full. Then run svn update --set-depth exclude on the one subdirectory you don't care about.
For TortoiseSVN, you can also do the same thing by right-clicking the folder you don't want, click on Update to revision...
, and then set the 'Update Depth' to Exclude
, as seen in this screen shot: