Get last message or diff of the very last CVS commit

Question

I am wondering how to get the last changes in a CVS module easily.

Answer 1

I think perhaps you could use the history command. Try something like:

cvs history -c -D 2012-04-01 -a

The above example shows all commits since the date specified (specified so the list is limited in length...).

-c means commits, -a means all users.

Commits with the same timestamp and user are then obviously from the same commit. You can then proceed to read the log message of that commit with

cvs log -r <version> <file>

Just select one of the files from the specific commit. You find the version of that file in the history output as well. Finally, to see the diff I would use

cvs diff -D "<date 1>" -D "<date 2>"

Here, "date 1" and "date 2" should be a timestamp just before and just after the commit. Note that (as far as I am aware), this does not seem to work if you are working on a branch (??). That would be the topic for another question I suppose.