Recovering files from archive of CVS *,v files

Question

I trying to recover some old source code (plain text) from a bunch of files that used to be managed with CVS. I have a directory containing all of the source code files in CVS's *,v file format. This looks mostly like the original files, but there are quite a bit of CVS specific header and revision information in there.

Is there a simply way to strip out all the CVS stuff and just keep the latest revision of the file?

Answer 1

You don't even need to use cvs. cvs was just a front end to rcs, and the *.v files are really rcs files. Just check them out. eg, if you have foo,v just execute:

co foo

and it will checkout foo from the *,v file

Answer 2

Yes, install a CVS client, set environment variable CVSROOT to point to the root of your repository, and type cvs checkout dir where dir is a top level directory in your repository.

If for some reason you only have individual ,v files, they are in rcs format, so if the rcs program is installed it should be able to get the tip revision out of any ,v file.

Answer 3

Latest windows binary can find here:

https://ftp.gnu.org/non-gnu/cvs/binary/stable/x86-woe/

For example: Place your reposity files here: c:\cvs (like c:\cvs\PROJECT create c:\cvs\CVSROOT

create c:\work save cvs.exe here

run:

cvs -d c:\cvs checkout PROJECT