> http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.advanced.sparsedirs.html Sparse directories are nifty, but even simpler (and usually what's desired in my humble experience) is: svn checkout --username anonymous http://foundry.supelec.fr/svn/<project>/trunk to just get the trunk and not all the myriad branches, archives, tags, etc., etc., etc.