Essential CVS, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Command Reference

This chapter is a comprehensive reference of all CVS commands, with a brief summary of what each does. It is intended to be useful as a quick reference, not a tutorial.

If you have never used CVS before, read Chapter 2 or Chapter 3 before reading this reference. Those chapters explain the basic concepts of CVS and how to use it effectively.

CVS Command-Line Options

CVS supports a number of command-line options that you can use to control various aspects of CVS behavior. Command-specific options are described in "CVS Commands,” later in this chapter. This section focuses on options that you pass to the cvs executable itself, not to any specific CVS command.

The syntax of any CVS command is as follows:

cvs [cvs-options] [command] [command-options-and-arguments]

The specific cvs-options modify the behavior of the main CVS code, rather than the code for a specific command. The following options are valid:

-a

Authenticate all network traffic. Without this option, the initial connection for the command is authenticated, but later traffic along the same data stream is assumed to be from the same source.

This option is available only with GSS-API connections. (If you use ssh as your rsh replacement in the ext connection mode, ssh authenticates the data stream, and you don’t need extra authentication.)

Support (in the client) for this option is generated when CVS is compiled. You can test whether your installation supports -a by checking whether it is listed in cvs ...