I know I’m going to forget how to do this, because I only ever need to do it once a year or something, so I’ll put it here for safe keeping:
To recover a file from svn that you deleted from your local repository, it’s first necessary to get the proper name of the file, and the revision of the repository it last existed in. To do that (assuming you don’t know, because if you do you have bigger issues), you go to the directory it was in (or as close as you can get to the directory it was in) and run:
> svn log --verbose
You should be able to find the file you’re looking for and the revision you need in the output of that command. Assuming your file’s name is ‘file.txt’ and it was in revision 250, you run the following to recover it:
> svn up -r 250 file.txt
Done. It’s there waiting for you. Enjoy. I had been fumbling around with ‘svn co’ syntax until a digital buddy of mine corrected me. Thanks, Nivex!