Is there a way to get a short CVS status from command line?

Question

When doing a cvs update, you get a nice summary of the state of the repository, for example:

M src/file1.txt
M src/file2.txt
C src/file3.txt
A src/file4.txt
? src/file5.txt

Is there a way to get this without actually updating? I know there is cvs status, but this is way to verbose:

===================================================================
File: file6.txt        Status: Up-to-date

Working revision:    1.2
Repository revision: 1.2     /var/cvs/cvsroot/file6.txt,v
Sticky Tag:          (none)
Sticky Date:         (none)
Sticky Options:      (none)

I could of course make a script to do the transformation from the latter to the former, but it seems a waste of time since cvs can obviously produce the former.

Answer 1

You can use the -n flag to get the update output without actually updating the files. You can also add -q (quiet) to suppress any server messages.

cvs -q -n update

Answer 2

@jmcnamara: Good tip!

And all this time I've been using this bash script:

cvs -q status "$@" | grep '^[?F]' | grep -v 'Up-to-date'

Answer 3

I have some aliases, that may be useful for somebody:

alias cvsstatus_command='cvs -q status | grep "^[?F]" | grep -v "Up-to-date" | \
    grep -v "\.so" | grep -v "\.[c]*project"'

alias cvsstatus_color='nawk '"'"'BEGIN \
    { \
        arr["Needs Merge"] = "0;31"; \
        arr["Needs Patch"] = "1;31"; \
        arr["conflicts"] = "1;33"; \
        arr["Locally Modified"] = "0;33"; \
        arr["Locally Added"] = "0;32" \
    } \
    { \
        l = $0; \
        for (pattern in arr) { \
            gsub(".*" pattern ".*", "\033[" arr[pattern] "m&\033[0m", l); \
        } \
        print l; \
    }'"'"

alias cvsstatus='cvsstatus_command | cvsstatus_color'

This will display only file names and their status, ignore all up-to-date files, remove all eclipse project files and shared objects and will also print the lines in different colors, depending on the status (for example, I have orange for locally modified; red for files, needing merge; green for locally added, etc)