If you could do something like "svn refresh" and have it just look at
the .svn/entries file to get the URL that'd be a lot easier. I mean,
ease of use is why "svn update" exists. You could just recheck out a
repository every time you wanted to update your code to the latest
version and manually do diffs comparing the newly checked out against
your own and merging where conflicts exist as appropriate but "svn
update" makes it a lot easier. Similarly, although technically maybe
unnecessary, I think an "svn refresh" command would be nice.
rm -rf bad_directory
svn update bad_directory
should do the trick.
tyler