rcsintro.5 (2010 09)

ManualsBrandsHP ManualsSoftwareHP-UX Manpages

rcsintro(5) rcsintro(5)

NAME

rcsintro - description of RCS commands

DESCRIPTION

Revision Control System (RCS) automates the storing, retrieval, logging, identiﬁcation, and merging of

revisions of ASCII text ﬁles. RCS is useful for managing ﬁles that are revised frequently.

Functions of RCS

• Storage and retrieval of revisions of text ﬁles. RCS saves revisions in a space-efﬁcient way. Revi-

sions can be retrieved by ranges of revision numbers, symbolic names, dates, authors, and states.

• Maintenance of a complete history of changes. RCS logs all changes automatically. In addition to

the text of each revision, RCS stores the author, date and time of check-in, and a log message sum-

marizing the change.

• Resolution of access conﬂicts. When two or more people try to modify the same revision of a ﬁle,

RCS alerts them and prevents one modiﬁcation from corrupting the other.

• Maintenance of a tree of revisions. RCS can maintain separate lines of development for each ﬁle. It

stores a tree structure that represents the ancestral relationships among revisions.

• Merging of revisions and resolution of conﬂicts. Two separate lines of development of a ﬁle can be

coalesced by merging. If the revisions to be merged affect the same lines of a ﬁle, RCS ﬂags the

overlapping changes.

• Release and conﬁguration control. Revisions can be assigned symbolic names and marked as

released, stable, experimental, etc. With these facilities, conﬁgurations of a ﬁle can be described

simply and directly.

• Automatic identiﬁcation of each revision with ﬁle name, revision number, creation time, author, etc.

This identiﬁcation is like a stamp that can be embedded at an appropriate place in the text of a revi-

sion. These stamps make it simple to determine which revisions of which ﬁles make up a given

conﬁguration.

• Minimization of secondary storage. RCS uses very little extra space for revisions (only the

differences are stored). If intermediate revisions are deleted, the remaining deltas are compressed

accordingly.

Getting Started with RCS

The basic user interface is extremely simple. The novice only needs to learn two commands:

and co

(see ci (1) and co (1)). ci, short for check in, deposits the contents of a text ﬁle into an archival ﬁle called

an RCS ﬁle. An RCS ﬁle contains all revisions of a particular text ﬁle.

co, short for check out , retrieves

revisions from an RCS ﬁle.

Suppose you have a ﬁle

f.c that you wish to put under control of RCS. Invoke the check-in command:

ci f.c

This command creates the RCS ﬁle f.c,v, stores f.c into it as revision 1.1, and deletes f.c. It also

asks you for a description. The description should be a synopsis of the contents of the ﬁle. All subsequent

check-in commands will ask for a log entry, which should summarize the changes that were made.

Files with names ending with

,v are called RCS ﬁles (v stands for "versions"); all other ﬁles are

presumed to be working ﬁles. To get back the working ﬁle f.c in the previous example, use the check-

out command:

co f.c

This command extracts the latest revision from f.c,v and writes it into f.c. You can now edit f.c and

check it back in by invoking:

ci f.c

ci increments the revision number properly. If ci complains with the message:

ci error: no lock set by your-login

your system administrator has decided to create all RCS ﬁles with the locking attribute set to "strict". In

this case, you should have locked the revision during the previous check-out. Your last check-out should

have been:

HP-UX 11i Version 3: September 2010 − 1 − Hewlett-Packard Company 1

Summary of content (4 pages)

PAGE 1
rcsintro(5) rcsintro(5) NAME rcsintro - description of RCS commands DESCRIPTION Revision Control System (RCS) automates the storing, retrieval, logging, identification, and merging of revisions of ASCII text files. RCS is useful for managing files that are revised frequently. Functions of RCS • Storage and retrieval of revisions of text files. RCS saves revisions in a space-efficient way. Revisions can be retrieved by ranges of revision numbers, symbolic names, dates, authors, and states.
PAGE 2
rcsintro(5) rcsintro(5) co -l f.c Of course, it is too late now to do the check-out with locking, because you probably modified f.c already, and a second check-out would overwrite your modifications. Instead, invoke: rcs -l f.c This command will lock the latest revision for you, unless somebody else has already locked it. In that case, you will have to negotiate with that person.
PAGE 3
rcsintro(5) rcsintro(5) • Both the RCS file and the working file are given. The RCS file name is of the form path1 /workfile ,v and the working file name is of the form path2 /workfile, where path1 and path2 are (possibly different or empty) paths and workfile is a file name. • Only the RCS file is given. Then the working file is assumed to be in the current directory and its name is derived from the name of the RCS file by removing path1 / and the suffix ,v. • Only the working file is given.
PAGE 4
(Notes) A (Notes) rA 4 Hewlett-Packard Company −1− HP-UX 11i Version 3: September 2010