Edit: I think it’s not automatic as it needs to abort operations and unlock the working copy in /path.
Subversion book:
Recursively clean up the working copy,
removing locks and resuming unfinished
operations. If you ever get a working
copy locked error, run this command to
remove stale locks and get your
working copy into a usable state
again. ” Note that in this context
lock refers to local filesystem
locking, not repository locking.
It’s basically a way of trying to recover any errors that occur with SVN.
Documentation on cleanup:
http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug-cleanup.html
“If a Subversion command cannot
complete successfully, perhaps due to
server problems, your working copy can
be left in an inconsistent state. In
that case you need to use TortoiseSVN
→ Cleanup on the folder. It is a good
idea to do this at the top level of
the working copy.Cleanup has another useful side
effect. If a file date changes but its
content doesn’t, Subversion cannot
tell whether it has really changed
except by doing a byte-by-byte
comparison with the pristine copy. If
you have a lot of files in this state
it makes acquiring status very slow,
which will make many dialogs slow to
respond. Executing a Cleanup on your
working copy will repair these
“broken” timestamps and restore status
checks to full speed.”