Moving and renaming files

Moving files to a different directory or renaming them is not difficult, but some of the ways in which this works may be non-obvious. (Moving or renaming a directory is even harder. See section Moving and renaming directories).

The examples below assume that the file old is renamed to new.

The Normal way to Rename

The normal way to move a file is to copy old to new, and then issue the normal CVS commands to remove old from the repository, and add new to it. (Both old and new could contain relative paths, for example `foo/bar.c').

$ mv old new
$ cvs remove old
$ cvs add new 
$ cvs commit -m "Renamed old to new" old new

This is the simplest way to move a file, it is not error-prone, and it preserves the history of what was done. Note that to access the history of the file you must specify the old or the new name, depending on what portion of the history you are accessing. For example, cvs log old will give the log up until the time of the rename.

When new is committed its revision numbers will start at 1.0 again, so if that bothers you, use the `-r rev' option to commit (see section commit options)

Moving the history file

This method is more dangerous, since it involves moving files inside the repository. Read this entire section before trying it out!

$ cd $CVSROOT/module
$ mv old,v new,v

Advantages:

• The log of changes is maintained intact.
• The revision numbers are not affected.

Disadvantages:

• Old releases of the module cannot easily be fetched from the repository. (The file will show up as new even in revisions from the time before it was renamed).
• There is no log information of when the file was renamed.
• Nasty things might happen if someone accesses the history file while you are moving it. Make sure no one else runs any of the CVS commands while you move it.

Copying the history file

This way also involves direct modifications to the repository. It is safe, but not without drawbacks.

# Copy the RCS file inside the repository
$ cd $CVSROOT/module
$ cp old,v new,v
# Remove the old file
$ cd ~/module
$ rm old
$ cvs remove old
$ cvs commit old
# Remove all tags from new
$ cvs update new
$ cvs log new             # Remember the non-branch tag names
$ cvs tag -d tag1 new
$ cvs tag -d tag2 new
...

By removing the tags you will be able to check out old revisions of the module.

Advantages:

• Checking out old revisions works correctly, as long as you use `-rtag' and not `-Ddate' to retrieve the revisions.
• The log of changes is maintained intact.
• The revision numbers are not affected.

Disadvantages:

• You cannot easily see the history of the file across the rename.
• Unless you use the `-r rev' (see section commit options) flag when new is committed its revision numbers will start at 1.0 again.

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