Essential CVS

Checking Out Files

CVS stores projects and files in a central repository, but you work from a working copy, called a sandbox , in your local directories. You create that sandbox with cvs checkout .

CVS creates the sandbox as a subdirectory of your current working directory. I like to create a directory to contain all my CVS sandboxes, and I use ~/cvs. From whichever directory you want a sandbox created in, run the command:

cvs -d repository_path checkout project_name

This command checks out all files for the named project. If your repository is on the local machine, the repository path is the full pathname of the CVS repository. If your repository is on a remote server, see the earlier Section 2.4. Example 2-10 shows a local checkout.

Example 2-10. Local repository checkout

$ mkdir ~/cvs
$ cd ~/cvs
$ cvs -d /var/lib/cvsroot checkout example
cvs checkout: Updating example
U example/file1
U example/file2

The checkout command puts a copy of the project’s files and subdirectories into a directory named for the project, created in the current working directory. It also puts some administrative files of its own in a subdirectory of the project directory, called CVS.

You can check out an individual file or subdirectory of a project by replacing project_name with the pathname to the file or directory, from the project’s root directory. See Chapter 3 for more information.

CVS stores the repository path as part of the sandbox, so you should never again need to use -d repository_path in commands ...