I use subversion to keep track of configuration file changes in the /etc directory on some of my Linux boxes.
However I have found occassionally some of the scripts that run against files in /etc/* descend into the .svn directory and try to execute the svn version control files.
To remove subversion from the /etc/* tree after it's been installed I did the following using find and xargs.
# change to the /etc directory
cd /etc
# starting in the current directory (/etc)
# find all directories with the name .svn
# and remove them
find . -type d -name \.svn | xargs rm -rf {}\;
You can also use the svn export command on a working copy to extract just he files to a folder