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I'm trying to connect from a Windows XP system to an SVN server but I'm getting weird behavior.

When I run this...

svn ls svn+ssh://myusername@myhost.com/path/to/svn_repository

...the cursor just freezes as if it's a long-running process with no output.

I've tried the above in both a Windows console and a MINGW32 console.

I can ping the SVN host machine from the XP machine. I can also log in to the SVN host from Windows using ssh. (I have ssh keys set up.) So this isn't a DNS problem or a firewall problem I don't think.

I'm able to run the command no problem on an OS X system.

OS X SVN version: 1.5.4 (works great)

Windows SVN version: 1.5.5 (doesn't work)

Repository host SVN version: 1.4.2

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

What do you have the SVN_SSH environment variable set to? Do you have any of the settings under [tunnels] in the svn config file?

You should be able to run this at the cmd prompt:

%SVN_SSH% -l myusername myhost.com

and it should give you a login prompt without prompting for a password.

Also, SVN_SSH seems to require forward-slashes as directory separators.

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If you need backslashes, they must be doubled as the commandline is parsed by Subversion using apr. This parsing follows the unix escaping rules, which use \ as an escape character. –  Bert Huijben Jun 21 '09 at 11:50
And if %SVN_SSH% is not defined, subversion tries to locate a ssh.exe (which is probably available if you use the MingW console) –  Bert Huijben Jun 21 '09 at 11:50
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