Chapter 6

number of GUI clients for Windows are available, the best of which is definitely 

WinCVS. You can find WinCVS here: http://wincvs.org.

I'll be showing you how to use CVS through the command line client, but it 

should be easy to adapt this knowledge to WinCVS.

The CVS Program

All CVS commands are run using a single program called cvs. The program always 

requires a command name specifying the action to perform. It can take options 

before the command and options after the command. Here's a few examples of 

CVS commands to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

$ cvs  q update  d

$ cvs diff  u

$ cvs log Template.pm

Anything after the command that isn't an option is usually treated as a filename 

argument for example, in the last command Template.pm is a filename argument. 

Without a filename argument, most CVS commands operate recursively on all files 

and directories below the current directory.

Repositories

CVS refers to the place where it stores your project's files as the repository, or some 

times the CVS root. A repository is simply a directory containing CVS files. You can 

use a repository on your local machine, or you can connect to one on a different 

machine. CVS supports two ways of connecting to remote CVS servers using 

CVS's native pserver protocol or through an rsh compatible service, such as ssh.

8

I'll cover two possibilities: setting up a local repository on your machine and con 

necting to a CVS repository using ssh. These are by far the most common uses of CVS.

Using a Local Repository

All you need to set up your own local repository is a directory for CVS to store its 

files. Once you've picked a directory for your repository, you must prepare it for 

CVS using the cvs init command. For example, to create a new repository in my 

8. rsh stands for remote shell, a common utility for running commands on remote hosts 

available in most UNIXes. ssh stands for secure shell, an rsh compatible utility that also 

encrypts all communication between client and server.

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