The svnadmin program is the repository administrator's best friend. Besides providing the ability to create Subversion repositories, this program allows you to perform several maintenance operations on those repositories. The syntax of svnadmin is similar to that of other Subversion command-line programs:

$ svnadmin help
general usage: svnadmin SUBCOMMAND REPOS_PATH  [ARGS & OPTIONS ...]
Type 'svnadmin help <subcommand>' for help on a specific subcommand.
Type 'svnadmin --version' to see the program version and FS modules.

Available subcommands:
   crashtest
   create
   deltify
…

We've already mentioned svnadmin's create subcommand (see the section called “Creating the Repository”). Most of the others we will cover later in this chapter. And you can consult the section called “svnadmin” for a full rundown of subcommands and what each of them offers.