How to read a file without checking out in perforce - perl

I'm writing a syntax check tool to parse several files on different branches.
Is there a way for me to read the contents without checking out the file?
The tool is written in Perl.

`p4 print //depot/path/to/file`;
(Usual requirements for running a p4 command apply -- make sure the p4 executable is in your PATH, make sure you're authenticated with p4 login, make sure you're connecting to the right server, etc.)
See p4 help print for more info on the print command -- you might find the -q and/or -o flags helpful depending on what exactly you need to do with the output.

Related

Can we wget with file list and renaming destination files?

I have this wget command:
sudo wget --user-agent='some-agent' --referer=http://some-referrer.html -N -r -nH --cut-dirs=x --timeout=xxx --directory-prefix=/directory/for/downloaded/files -i list-of-files-to-download.txt
-N will check if there is actually a newer file to download.
-r will turn the recursive retrieving on.
-nH will disable the generation of host-prefixed directories.
--cut-dirs=X will avoid the generation of the host's subdirectories.
--timeout=xxx will, well, timeout :)
--directory-prefix will store files in the desired directorty.
This works nice, no problem.
Now, to the issue:
Let's say my files-to-download.txt has these kind of files:
http://website/directory1/picture-same-name.jpg
http://website/directory2/picture-same-name.jpg
http://website/directory3/picture-same-name.jpg
etc...
You can see the problem: on the second download, wget will see we already have a picture-same-name.jpg, so it won't download the second or any of the following ones with the same name. I cannot mirror the directory structure because I need all the downloaded files to be in the same directory. I can't use the -O option because it clashes with --N, and I need that. I've tried to use -nd, but doesn't seem to work for me.
So, ideally, I need to be able to:
a.- wget from a list of url's the way I do now, keeping my parameters.
b.- get all files at the same directory and being able to rename each file.
Does anybody have any solution to this?
Thanks in advance.
I would suggest 2 approaches -
Use the "-nc" or the "--no-clobber" option. From the man page -
-nc
--no-clobber
If a file is downloaded more than once in the same directory, >Wget's behavior depends on a few options, including -nc. In certain >cases, the local file will be
clobbered, or overwritten, upon repeated download. In other >cases it will be preserved.
When running Wget without -N, -nc, -r, or -p, downloading the >same file in the same directory will result in the original copy of file >being preserved and the second copy
being named file.1. If that file is downloaded yet again, the >third copy will be named file.2, and so on. (This is also the behavior >with -nd, even if -r or -p are in
effect.) When -nc is specified, this behavior is suppressed, >and Wget will refuse to download newer copies of file. Therefore, ""no->clobber"" is actually a misnomer in
this mode---it's not clobbering that's prevented (as the >numeric suffixes were already preventing clobbering), but rather the >multiple version saving that's prevented.
When running Wget with -r or -p, but without -N, -nd, or -nc, >re-downloading a file will result in the new copy simply overwriting the >old. Adding -nc will prevent this
behavior, instead causing the original version to be preserved >and any newer copies on the server to be ignored.
When running Wget with -N, with or without -r or -p, the >decision as to whether or not to download a newer copy of a file depends >on the local and remote timestamp and
size of the file. -nc may not be specified at the same time as >-N.
A combination with -O/--output-document is only accepted if the >given output file does not exist.
Note that when -nc is specified, files with the suffixes .html >or .htm will be loaded from the local disk and parsed as if they had been >retrieved from the Web.
As you can see from this man page entry, the behavior might be unpredictable/unexpected. You will need to see if it works for you.
Another approach would be to use a bash script. I am most comfortable using bash on *nix, so forgive the platform dependency. However the logic is sound, and with a bit of modifications, you can get it to work on other platforms/scripts as well.
Sample pseudocode bash script -
for i in `cat list-of-files-to-download.txt`;
do
wget <all your flags except the -i flag> $i -O /path/to/custom/directory/filename ;
done ;
You can modify the script to download each file to a temporary file, parse $i to get the filename from the URL, check if the file exists on the disk, and then take a decision to rename the temp file to the name that you want.
This offers much more control over your downloads.

Perforce: Prevent keywords from being expanded when syncing files out of the depot?

I have a situation where I'd like to diff two branches in Perforce. Normally I'd use diff2 to do a server-side diff but in this case the files on the branches are so large that the diff2 call ends up filling up /tmp on my server trying to diff them and the diff fails.
I can't bring down my server to rectify this so I'm looking at checking out the the content to disk and using diff on the command line to inspect and compare the content.
The trouble is: most of the files have RCS keywords in them that are being expanded.
I know can remove keyword expansion from a file by opening the files for edit and removing the -k attribute from the files in the process, but that seems a bit brute force. I was hoping I could just tell the p4 sync command not to expand the keywords on checkout. I can't seem to find a way to do this? Is it possible?
As a possible alternative solution, does anyone know if you can tell p4 diff2 which directory to use for temporary space when you call it? If I could tell it to use abundant NAS space instead of /tmp on the Perforce server I might be able to make it work.
I'm using 2010.x version of Perforce if that changes the answer in any way.
There's no way I know of to disable keyword expansion on sync. Here's what I would try:
1) Create a branch spec between the two sets of files
2) Run "p4 files //path/to/files/... | cut -d '#' -f 1 > tmp"
Path to files above should be the right hand side of the branch spec you created
3) p4 -x tmp diff2 -b
This tells p4 to iterate over the lines of text in 'tmp' and treat them as arguments to the command. I think /tmp on your server will get cleared in-between each file this way, preventing it from filling up.
I unfortunately don't have files large enough to test that it works, so this is entirely theoretical.
To change the temp directory that p4d uses just TEMP or TMP to a different path and restart p4d. If you're on Windows make sure to call 'p4 set -S perforce TMP=' to set variable for the Perforce service; without the -S perforce you'll just set it for the current user.

How do I lock a Perforce label from the command line?

I recently imported a VSS repository into Perforce. This included hundreds of labels, which the developer that was using VSS (now using Perforce) relies upon. I accidentally deleted them and had to do the import again. To prevent such accidental deletion in the future, I want to lock all the labels, but doing it through P4V would take forever. I would like to write a script to do it for me.
I can get all the labels into a text file with the p4 labels command, and with some text editor macro processing I could build up a script to lock them all. I just need to know the command(s) to do this.
This can be done by automating the process of editing the label spec. The process is as follows:
Send the label spec to standard output with the -o switch.
Pipe that output to a utility that can manipulate it and set the label's "Options" to "locked". In this case, the Unix utility sed gets the job done. (I'm on Windows, so I used this port. Others can be found in this answer.)
Pipe this updated spec back into the label command with the -i switch.
Put it all together and you get a command that looks like this.
p4 label -o <label name> | sed 's/^Options:.*/Options: locked/' | p4 label -i
The relevant Perforce doc is here.
To dump a label spec to standard output:
p4 -o *labelname*
To read a label spec from standard input:
p4 -i *labelname*
in between you'll need to process the text to include the 'options: locked' probably by redirecting standard output to a text file e.g. ('p4 -o labelname > labelspect.txt'), process the text file in your chosen manner, and then read the file into standard in ('p4 -i labelname < labelspect.txt')

CVS command to get brief history of repository

I am using following command to get a brief history of the CVS repository.
cvs -d :pserver:*User*:*Password*#*Repo* rlog -N -d "*StartDate* < *EndDate*" *Module*
This works just fine except for one small problem. It lists all tags created on each file in that repository. I want the tag info, but I only want the tags that are created in the date range specified. How do I change this command to do that.
I don't see a way to do that natively with the rlog command. Faced with this problem, I would write a Perl script to parse the output of the command, correlate the tags to the date range that I want and print them.
Another solution would be to parse the ,v files directly, but I haven't found any robust libraries for doing that. I prefer Perl for that type of task, and the parsing modules don't seem to be very high quality.

What is the command line syntax to delete files in Perforce?

I am creating some build scripts that interact with Perforce and I would like to mark for delete a few files. What exactly is the P4 syntax using the command line?
p4 delete filename
(output of p4 help delete)
delete -- Open an existing file to delete it from the depot
p4 delete [ -c changelist# ] [ -n ] file ...
Opens a file that currently exists in the depot for deletion.
If the file is present on the client it is removed. If a pending
changelist number is given with the -c flag the opened file is
associated with that changelist, otherwise it is associated with
the 'default' pending changelist.
Files that are deleted generally do not appear on the have list.
The -n flag displays what would be opened for delete without actually
changing any files or metadata.
Teach a man to fish:
p4 help - gets you general command
syntax
p4 help commands - lists the
commands
p4 help <command name> -
provides detailed help for a specific
command
http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.062/manuals/boilerplates/quickstart.html
Deleting files
To delete files from both the Perforce server and your workspace, issue the p4 delete command. For example:
p4 delete demo.txt readme.txt
The specified files are removed from your workspace and marked for deletion from the server. If you decide you don't want to delete the files after all, issue the p4 revert command. When you revert files opened for delete, Perforce restores them to your workspace.
Admitted - it takes a (small) number of steps to find the (excellent!) Perforce user guide online in the version that matches your installation and get to the chapter with the information you need.
Whenever I find myself in need of anything about the p4 command line client, I rely on the help Perforce have built into it. Accessing it could not be easier:
on the command line, enter p4
This gets you to the information Michael Burr has shown in his answer (and some more).
If you do not get a help screen right away, something is wrong with our client configuration, e.g. P4PORT is not set properly. You obviously need to fix that first.