recovering a deleted file

I deleted a file and wanted to get it back. This and several related
tasks were unexpectedly challenging. What am I missing? I did finally
get the file, but several things I thought would work did not.

I did a svn delete on a bunch of files and then commit from the top
level, making version 3. Then in the subdirectory I said
$ svn log survival-internal.Rd
Skipped survival-internal.Rd

I was hoping this would show me the history. Then
$ echo $REPOS
file:///usr/local/var/subversion/survivalrds/trunk
$ svn log $REPOS/man/survival-internal.Rd
svn: Filesystem has no item
svn: file not found: revision '3', path
'/survivalrds/trunk/man/survival-internal.Rd'

$ svn log -r 1:3 $REPOS/man/survival-internal.Rd
svn: Filesystem has no item
svn: file not found: revision '3', path
'/survivalrds/trunk/man/survival-internal.Rd'
$ svn log -r 1:2 $REPOS/man/survival-internal.Rd
------------------------------------------------------------------------
rev 1: ross | 2003-10-28 16:44:30 -0800 (Tue, 28 Oct 2003) | 5 lines

...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
rev 2: ross | 2003-10-29 16:50:01 -0800 (Wed, 29 Oct 2003) | 6 lines

..
-------------------------------------------

Is that the way it's supposed to be? I suppose there's some argument
for blowing off deleted files, but I'd think at least -r 1:3 would work.

Then I tried update to get the file:
$ svn update -r 2 survival-internal.Rd
svn: warning: svn_wc_is_wc_root: 'survival-internal.Rd' is not a
versioned resource
$ svn update -r 2 $REPOS/man/survival-internal.Rd
svn: Path is not a working copy directory
svn: 'file:///usr/local/var/subversion/survivalrds/trunk/man' is not a
working copy

How come neither of those worked?

I finally found success with
$ svn cat -r 2 $REPOS/man/survival-internal.Rd

Oh, I also tried co, but it created a directory..

svn 0.32.1 on Debian GNU/Linux.

Thanks for any clues you can provide.

-- 
Ross Boylan                                      wk:  (415) 502-4031
530 Parnassus Avenue (Library) rm 115-4          ross@biostat.ucsf.edu
Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics           fax: (415) 476-9856
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94143-0840                     hm:  (415) 550-1062
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