Managing and Sharing Files with RCS and CVS (Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition)

39.4. Managing and Sharing Files with RCS and CVS

How many times have you wished that you could get a copy of a file the way it looked an hour ago, or yesterday, or last year? That includes times when you just deleted the file -- and, especially, when the file is too new for your computer's backup system to have made any copies of it. (You do have regular backups of your system, don't you? ;-)) RCS (Revision Control System) and CVS (Concurrent Version System) let you recover a previous version of a file from an archive. Many systems come with either RCS, CVS, or both installed already; if they don't appear to be on your system either install the appropriate package or grab the most current versions from FSF's website (http://www.fsf.org).

How does the archive get there? As you work, you periodically put a "snapshot" of the file into the archive. (The archive systems save the changes -- not the whole file -- so this doesn't take as much disk space as it might.) The archive remembers the date and time you store each version. You can enter a log message to describe what's changed since the last time you archived the file. You can do much more, but those are the basics.

When you need a previous version of the file, you read the archive log to decide which version is best (by date and time or by the log message). Then you use one command to get back that version. You don't have to wait for the system manager to load a tape.

Of course, these tools can't protect you from a disk crash or another disaster; that's what reliable backups are for. RCS and CVS are best for protecting you from accidentally deleting or corrupting files. But they're also great for group development projects: controlling who's working on a file, who did what when, and so on. That's especially true of CVS, which was designed to handle software developers from around the world collaborating on a project over a network -- as well as a group of developers in the same office. One of my favorite features is the ability to see diff (Section 11.1) listings of what's changed between versions.

Once you get started with these tools, you'll wonder how you ever did without them. Section 39.5 explains how to protect your files with RCS. See Section 39.7 for an introduction to CVS.

-- JP