This section describes the `command_options' that are available across several CVS commands. These options are always given to the right of `cvs_command'. Not all commands support all of these options; each option is only supported for commands where it makes sense. However, when a command has one of these options you can almost always count on the same behavior of the option as in other commands. (Other command options, which are listed with the individual commands, may have different behavior from one CVS command to the other).
Warning: the `history' command is an exception; it supports many options that conflict even with these standard options.
-D date_spec
checkout,
diff, export, history,
rdiff, rtag, and update commands.
(The history command uses this option in a
slightly different way; see section history options).
A wide variety of date formats are supported by
CVS. The most standard ones are ISO8601 (from the
International Standards Organization) and the Internet
e-mail standard (specified in RFC822 as amended by
RFC1123).
ISO8601 dates have many variants but a few examples
are:
1972-09-24 1972-09-24 20:05There are a lot more ISO8601 date formats, and CVS accepts many of them, but you probably don't want to hear the whole long story :-). In addition to the dates allowed in Internet e-mail itself, CVS also allows some of the fields to be omitted. For example:
24 Sep 1972 20:05 24 SepThe date is interpreted as being in the local timezone, unless a specific timezone is specified. These two date formats are preferred. However, CVS currently accepts a wide variety of other date formats. They are intentionally not documented here in any detail, and future versions of CVS might not accept all of them. One such format is
month/day/year. This may
confuse people who are accustomed to having the month
and day in the other order; `1/4/96' is January 4,
not April 1.
Remember to quote the argument to the `-D'
flag so that your shell doesn't interpret spaces as
argument separators. A command using the `-D'
flag can look like this:
$ cvs diff -D "1 hour ago" cvs.texinfo
-f
annotate, checkout, export,
rdiff, rtag, and update.
Warning: The commit and remove
commands also have a
`-f' option, but it has a different behavior for
those commands. See section commit options, and
section Removing files.
-k kflag
checkout or update commands,
CVS associates your selected kflag with the
file, and continues to use it with future update
commands on the same file until you specify otherwise.
The `-k' option is available with the add,
checkout, diff, import and
update commands.
-l
annotate, checkout,
commit, diff, edit, editors, export,
log, rdiff, remove, rtag,
status, tag, unedit, update, watch,
and watchers.
-m message
add,
commit and import.
-n
checkout, commit, export,
and rtag commands.
-P
-p
checkout and update commands.
-R
annotate, checkout,
commit, diff, edit, editors, export,
rdiff, remove, rtag,
status, tag, unedit, update, watch,
and watchers.
-r tag
tag or rtag command, two special tags are
always available: `HEAD' refers to the most recent version
available in the repository, and `BASE' refers to the
revision you last checked out into the current working directory.
The tag specification is sticky when you use this
with checkout or update to make your own
copy of a file: CVS remembers the tag and continues to use it on
future update commands, until you specify otherwise (for more information
on sticky tags/dates, see section Sticky tags).
The tag can be either a symbolic or numeric tag, as
described in section Tags--Symbolic revisions, or the name of a branch, as
described in section Branching and merging.
Specifying the `-q' global option along with the
`-r' command option is often useful, to suppress
the warning messages when the RCS file
does not contain the specified tag.
Warning: this is not the same as the overall `cvs -r' option,
which you can specify to the left of a CVS command!
`-r' is available with the checkout, commit,
diff, history, export, rdiff,
rtag, and update commands.
-W
import,
and update.
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