Essential CVS

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, I suggest you 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 Section 10.2, 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 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, but if you use ssh as your rsh replacement in the ext connection mode, ssh authenticates the data stream.

This option is supported if it is listed in cvs --help-options. The command-line client can be compiled to support it by using the --enable-client option to the configure script.

--allow-root=directory