14.2 Basic RCS Operations

Normally, you maintain RCS files in a subdirectory of your working directory called RCS, so the first step in using RCS should be:

mkdir RCS

Next, you place an existing file (or files) under RCS control by running the checkin command:

ci  file 

This creates a file called file,v in directory RCS. file,v is called an RCS file, and it will store all future revisions of file. When you run ci on a file for the first time, you are prompted to describe the contents. ci then deposits file into the RCS directory as revision 1.1.

To edit a new revision, check out a copy:

co -l  file 

This causes RCS to extract a copy of file from the RCS directory. You must lock the file with -l to make it writable by you. This copy is called a working file. When you're done editing, you can record the changes by checking the working file back in again:

ci  file 

This time, you are prompted to enter a log of the changes made, and the file is deposited as revision 1.2. Note that a checkin normally removes the working file. To retrieve a read-only copy, do a checkout without a lock:

co  file 

This is useful when you need to keep a copy on hand for compiling or searching. As a shortcut to the previous ci/co, you could type:

ci -u  file 

This checks in the file but immediately checks out a read-only copy. To compare changes between a working file and its latest revision, you can type:

rcsdiff  file 

Another useful command is rlog, which shows a summary of log messages.

System administrators can use the rcs command to set up default behavior for RCS.