RCS

Revision Control System

RCS is a set of tools ( ci, co, rcs, rlog ) that make up the revision control system. I am providign a list of common flags. For more complete information look at the man pages on any of the tools.

Make a directory in the current path named "RCS" , and all of the log files will be kept there, otherwise you will have all of the files in the current directory ( which is messy ).

Basic commands

ci

checks in and removes existing copy

ci -u

checks in and releases lock (file becomes read-only)

ci -l

checks in and retains lock (file is rw)

co

checks out with no lock (read-only)

co -u

checks out with no lock (read-only)

co -l

checks out and obtains exclusive lock

rlog

look at log

rcsdiff

compare revisions and create patches. Example:

rcsdiff -r1.4 -u foo.c

rcs -u

break locks

rlog

read any log entries on the file

Logs and headers in files

Put strings into files and RCS will expand them:
```
$Header$
$Id$
$Date$
$Log$
```

For example, $Header$ gets expanded to something like this:

$Header: RCS/foo.cpp,v 1.2 1999/04/26 23:18:53 jclark $

Reverting to old versions without dealing with branch messiness

Reverting to an old version by checking out the old version and then checking it back in would normally force you to deal with branches which can get messy.

An easier way is to do something like:

ci -l foo.cpp     # save old version before clobbering
                  # plus get a lock on the file
co -r1.5 foo.cpp  # revert to version 1.5
ci -u foo.cpp     # check in the reverted file and unlock