Essential CVS

Environment Variables

Several environment variables affect CVS. Some are read only when CVS is the client, and some are read only when CVS is the server. In local or fork modes, both sets are read.

Client Environment Variables

The environment variables in the following list are read and used by the process that runs on the client computer and must be in the calling user’s environment:

COMSPEC

OS/2 only. This variable sets the command interpreter and defaults to CMD.EXE.

CVS_CLIENT_LOG

Used for debugging CVS in client/server mode. If set, everything sent to the server is stored in the CVS_CLIENT_LOG.in file, and everything received by the client is stored in CVS_CLIENT_LOG.out.

CVS_CLIENT_PORT

Used to set the port the client uses to connect to the CVS server in kserver, gserver, and pserver modes. By default, the client uses port 2401 (gserver and pserver) or port 1999 (kserver) to connect to the server.

CVSIGNORE

A whitespace-separated list of filename patterns that should be ignored. See Section 11.2.4 earlier in this chapter.

CVS_IGNORE_REMOTE_ROOT

Obsolete since CVS 1.10. When set, it prevented CVS from overwriting the CVS/Root file if the -d repository_path option was set. CVS no longer overwrites the file.

CVSEDITOR or EDITOR or VISUAL

Used to set the editor CVS calls when it opens an editor for log messages. On Unix and Linux systems, the default editor is vi. Using CVSEDITOR is preferred over EDITOR and VISUAL, as other variables may be used by other programs.

CVS_PASSFILE ...