RCSHIST(1)

💖 RCSHIST(1) — display RCS change history 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the RCSHIST(1) manual page from the User commands section — it's all about rcshist, the utility that serves RCS change history like it's dropping the most organized photo dump ever. ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

rcshist — display RCS change history

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

rcshist [-mR] [-r branch|MAIN|ALL] file ...
rcshist -L revision rcsfile

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

The rcshist utility displays the complete revision history of a set of RCS files including log messages and patches. The output is sorted in reverse date order over all revisions of all files. iconic behavior, honestly.

The second form displays the patch associated with a particular revision of an RCS file. In this case, the revision must be specified numerically and rcsfile must be an RCS ,v file.

The options are as follows:

• -m — reduce memory usage by retaining only a small fraction of revisions in memory. Normally, rcshist will cache all revisions of all files, since this reduces computation time significantly. For very large file sets, this behavior can cause excessive memory usage.
• -R — recursively search all paths specified for files to analyze.
• -r branch|MAIN|ALL — restrict output to revisions on the specified symbolic branch tag. Two special branch names are supported:
  • MAIN — only revisions on the main trunk branch are displayed.
  • ALL — all revisions are displayed regardless of their branch. This is the default if rcshist cannot infer a branch tag from a CVS/Tag file.

lowkey important: that -m note is real — the manpage says caching everything can cause excessive memory usage for very large file sets. no cap.

Each file listed on the command line specifies an RCS file to be examined. The filename is interpreted as follows:

• If the file has a ,v suffix, rcshist considers it as an RCS format file and opens it directly.
• If the file has no ,v suffix, rcshist searches for a CVS directory in the same directory as the file. If this exists, rcshist attempts to find the RCS file based on the contents of CVS/Root and CVS/Repository files. If a CVS/Tag file exists, and if no branch tag has been specified on the command-line or inferred from elsewhere, then rcshist uses the branch tag from CVS/Tag as the default branch to display.
• Finally, if the file has no ,v suffix and no CVS directory was found, rcshist searches for an RCS directory in the same directory as the file. If this exists, rcshist will look for an RCS ,v file corresponding to the specified file.

If rcshist fails to locate an RCS file corresponding to a specified command-line filename, rcshist will simply print a warning message and continue. polite little warning, not a whole meltdown. 🫶

🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

• RCS_DIR — if defined, specifies the directory in which RCS archive files are found. Normally files are found in "./RCS".

🦋 AUTHORS 🦋

• Ian Dowse <iedowse@FreeBSD.org>
• Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>

🎀 SEE ALSO 🎀

checkout(1), cvs(1), rcs(1), rcsdiff(1), rcsfile(5), rlog(1)

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💖 that's the whole page, bestie — footer energy is RCSHIST(1) and 2025-01-01, signing off. 💖