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Administrative files
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Administrative files
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Sometimes in writing an administrative file, you might want the file to be able to know various things based on environment CVS is running in. There are several mechanisms to do that.
To find the home directory of the user running CVS
(from the HOME environment variable), use
`~' followed by `/' or the end of the line.
Likewise for the home directory of user, use
`~user'. These variables are expanded on
the server machine, and don't get any reasonable
expansion if pserver (see Password authenticated)
is in use; therefore user variables (see below) may be
a better choice to customize behavior based on the user
running CVS.
One may want to know about various pieces of
information internal to CVS. A CVS internal
variable has the syntax ${variable},
where variable starts with a letter and consists
of alphanumberic characters and `_'. If the
character following variable is a
non-alphanumeric character other than `_', the
`{' and `}' can be omitted. The CVS
internal variables are:
CVSROOT
|
This is the value of the CVS root in use. See Repository, for a description of the various ways to specify this. |
RCSBIN
|
In CVS 1.9.18 and older, this specified the directory where CVS was looking for RCS programs. Because CVS no longer runs RCS programs, specifying this internal variable is now an error. |
CVSEDITOR
VISUAL
EDITOR
|
These all expand to the same value, which is the editor that CVS is using. See Global options, for how to specify this. |
USER
|
Username of the user running CVS (on the CVS server machine). |
If you want to pass a value to the administrative files
which the user who is running CVS can specify,
use a user variable. To expand a user variable, the
administrative file contains
${=variable}. To set a user variable,
specify the global option `-s' to CVS, with
argument variable=value. It may be
particularly useful to specify this option via
`.cvsrc' (see ~/.cvsrc).
For example, if you want the administrative file to
refer to a test directory you might create a user
variable TESTDIR. Then if CVS is invoked
as
cvs -s TESTDIR=/work/local/tests
and the
administrative file contains sh ${=TESTDIR}/runtests, then that string is expanded
to sh /work/local/tests/runtests.
All other strings containing `$' are reserved;
there is no way to quote a `$' character so that
`$' represents itself.
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Administrative files
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