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2.1.4 Substitution mode option

Some commands accept an option of the form -ksubst, used to control how keywords (see Concepts) are expanded in the working file. In the following table of subst values, the example keyword is ‘Revision’ and its value is ‘5.13’.

kv

Generate ‘$Revision: 5.13 $’ (dollar-sign, keyword, colon, space, value, space, dollar-sign). A locker’s name is inserted in the value of the Header, Id and Locker keyword strings only as a file is being locked, i.e., by ci -l and co -l. This is the default substitution mode.

kvl

Like -kkv, except that a locker’s name is always inserted if the given revision is currently locked.

k

Generate ‘$Revision$’ (dollar-sign, keyword, dollar-sign). This is useful when comparing different revisions of a file. Log messages are inserted after Log keywords even if -kk is specified, since this tends to be more useful when merging changes.

o

Like -kkv, but use the old value present in the working file just before it was checked in. This can be useful for file formats that cannot tolerate any changes to substrings that happen to take the form of keyword strings.

b

Like -ko, but do all file i/o in binary mode. This makes little difference on POSIX and Unix hosts, but on DOS-like hosts one should use rcs -i -kb to initialize an RCS file intended to be used for binary files. Also, on all hosts, rcsmerge normally refuses to merge files when -kb is in effect.

v

Generate ‘5.13’ (value only). Further keyword substitution cannot be performed once the keyword names are removed, so this should be used with care. Because of this danger of losing keywords, -kv cannot be combined with -l, and the owner write permission of the working file is turned off; to edit the file later, check it out again without -kv.