Voice of my experience

You can set ignore property for directories under SVN to ignore specific file or a group using wildcard.

Here are few examples:
svn propset svn:ignore '*' .
Run this command inside a directory to ignore all the files inside it. It is best suited for cache directory where you want the cache folder to be inside SVN since it is a part if the structure but do not want unwanted files and directories in it.

svn propset svn:ignore changelog.txt .
This will ignore changelog.txt file to appear in svn status list.

svn propset svn:ignore “*.tmp” .
Ignore all file with tmp extension.

svn propset svn:ignore -R 'Thumbs.db
Thumbs.db:encryptable' .
Thumbs.db & Thumbs.db:encryptable are files that gets created when you open a directory in windows machines and it has few images in it. These files always come up in your svn status list and create problem. The command will solve the problem. The -R Option is to set the property recursively down to all the directories.
Note: Multiple file name must be inside quotes and should be separated by new line.