Automating System Administration with Perl, 2nd Edition

Appendix E. The Five-Minute RCS Tutorial

This quick tutorial will teach you everything you need to know to use the Revision Control System (RCS) for system administration. RCS is useful for applying version control to all of your system files. It has considerably more functionality than we’ll discuss here, so be sure to take a look at the manual pages and the references at the end of this appendix if you plan to use it heavily. You may also be wondering why we’re bothering with RCS when more modern systems, such as Git and Subversion, exist. That’s a good question, and I’ll address it at the end of the tutorial. In the meantime, though, let’s get the RCS basics down; they’ll help with the explanation later.

RCS functions like a car rental agency. Only one person at a time can actually rent a particular car and drive it off the lot. The agency can only rent out a new car after adding it to its pool. Customers can browse the list of cars (and their features) at any time, but if two people want to rent the same car, the second person must wait for the car to be returned to the lot. Finally, car rental agencies inspect cars very carefully after they have been returned and record any changes that took place during the rental. All of these properties hold true for RCS as well.

In RCS, a file is like a car. If you wish to keep track of a file using RCS (i.e., add it to the rental lot), you must “check it in” for the first time:

$ ci -u inetd.conf

ci stands for “check in,” and the -u tells ...