Recently while working on a project I found that we were keeping .svn metadata in our Git repo.

It was not desirable to keep that in the Git repo but we needed to keep those .svn object in the local filesystem.

The below steps allowed me to do that:

1) Find all the .svn objects

find . -name .svn | xargs -n1

2) Remove them from Git
The (–cache) flag keeps them on disk and (-r) does it recursively

find . -name .svn | xargs -n1 echo git rm --cache -r

3) Add a .gitignore  file with contents below to prevent tracking of .svn objects

.svn

4) Commit changes

git commit -m "Delete .svn metadata from project"

5)Verify

git status
git diff