SVN – Ignore contents of a directory

To ignore the contents of a directory in Subversion, do this:

cd $directory_in_question
svn propset svn:ignore '*' .
svn ci -m "Ignoring anything in $directory_in_question"

This ignores files and subdirectories in the directory and ignores any new added nodes to the directory after the commit. The quotes around the * character ensure this is what happens.