To avoid this situation in the future, I would follow the recommended layout for SVN projects:
Put your code in the
/someproject/trunk folder (or just
/trunk if you want to put only one
project in the repository)
Created branches as /someproject/branches/somebranch
Put tags under /someproject/tags
Now when you check out a working copy, be sure to check out only trunk or some individual branch. Don't check everything out in one huge working copy containing all branches.1
1Unless you know what you're doing, in which case you know how to create shallow working copies.
You can also delete the branch on the remote directly. Having done that, the next update will remove it from your working copy.
svn rm "^/reponame/branches/name_of_branch" -m "cleaning up old branch name_of_branch"
The ^ is short for the URL of the remote, as seen in 'svn info'. The double quotes are necessary on Windows command line, because ^ is a special character.
This command will also work if you have never checked out the branch.
If you wish to not fetch/checkout the entire repo, execute the following command on your terminal:
1) get the absolute path of the directory that will contain your working copy
> pwd
2) Start svn code checkout
> svn checkout <branch url> <absolute path from point 1>
The above steps will get you the files inside the branch folder and not the entire folder.