Basic CVS Commands: A Single Revision Cycle

As an example for the CVS novice, the following commands perform a single software revision cycle:

cvs checkout jet/jtc90s.F
cd jet
cvs log jtc90s.F
emacs jtc90s.F
cvs commit -m "Changed jet energy scale!" jtc90s.F
cd ..
cvs release -d jet

The cvs checkout command creates in the users working directory a subdirectory jet/, and places in jet/ the file jtc90s.F. This is like CMS fetch with an additional directory structure created. The user goes to the jet/ subdirectory and issues the cvs log command, which presents her with the history of the file jtc90s.F, like CMS history. The user then edits the file (in this case using emacs) and places the file back in CVS using cvs commit and including comments, like CMS replace/keep. Finally the user passes back up to the working directory and removes the entire jet/ directory tree with the command cvs release -d, which checks to make sure there aren't any changes left to incorporate before deleting the files.