Chapter 13. The Revision Control System
The Revision Control System (RCS ) provides a series of commands for maintaining multiple versions of files. It can manage both textual and binary data. While primarily used for software development, RCS can manage other files as well: documentation, textual databases, and so on.
This chapter presents the following topics:
Overview of commands
Basic operation
General RCS specifications
Alphabetical summary of commands
The Revision Control System (RCS) is designed to keep track of multiple file revisions, thereby reducing the amount of storage space needed. With RCS you can automatically store and retrieve revisions, merge or compare revisions, keep a complete history (or log) of changes, and identify revisions using symbolic keywords. RCS preserves execute permission on the files it manages, and you can store binary data in RCS files.
RCS is not a standard part of Solaris. It can be obtained from the Free Software Foundation (see http://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/). It typically does come with GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. The Official RCS Homepage may be found at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/trinkle/RCS/. This chapter describes RCS Version 5.7.
For more information, see Applying RCS and SCCS, listed in the Bibliography.
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