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Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition
book

Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

by Arnold Robbins
October 2005
Intermediate to advanced
908 pages
46h 42m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

Chapter 13. The Revision Control System

The Revision Control System (RCS ) provides a series of commands for maintaining multiple versions of files. It can manage both textual and binary data. While primarily used for software development, RCS can manage other files as well: documentation, textual databases, and so on.

This chapter presents the following topics:

  • Overview of commands

  • Basic operation

  • General RCS specifications

  • Alphabetical summary of commands

The Revision Control System (RCS) is designed to keep track of multiple file revisions, thereby reducing the amount of storage space needed. With RCS you can automatically store and retrieve revisions, merge or compare revisions, keep a complete history (or log) of changes, and identify revisions using symbolic keywords. RCS preserves execute permission on the files it manages, and you can store binary data in RCS files.

RCS is not a standard part of Solaris. It can be obtained from the Free Software Foundation (see http://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/). It typically does come with GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. The Official RCS Homepage may be found at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/trinkle/RCS/. This chapter describes RCS Version 5.7.

For more information, see Applying RCS and SCCS, listed in the Bibliography.

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