One minute's guide on using CVS to manage your files

The following describes how to start using CVS to manage your files.

- Create a directory that is to be managed by CVS. In fact, this is the repository that stores all the versions of your files and CVS' own management files.

mkdir $HOME/cvsroot

Add the following line to your .bashrc file

export CVSROOT=$HOME/cvsroot

and then source your .bashrc file. This is probably the only CVS variable that matters.

- Run cvs init to initialize the repository $HOME/cvsroot.

- Create any directory where you want to store your files. Suppose you have an existing $HOME/writings/ directory that stores all your files, then you can do the following:

# Create the directory in your CVS repository directly
mkdir $HOME/cvsroot/writings
# Go to your home directory and do a checkout
# Your existing files will stay there
cd $HOME
cvs co writings

- Now you can go to your $HOME/writings directory and add all the files that you want to manage with CVS

cd $HOME/writings
# Add all the files that you want to manage with CVS
cvs add *.txt

- Once you are done, you can just run cvs commit to store all your files into your CVS repository. Add one or two lines of comment if needed.

- From now on you can just continue working on your files. Once you feel the need to save these files, just run cvs commit again.

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