Appendix D All environment variables which affect CVS

This is a complete list of all environment variables that affect CVS.

$CVSIGNORE

A whitespace-separated list of file name patterns that CVS should ignore. See cvsignore.

$CVSWRAPPERS

A whitespace-separated list of file name patterns that CVS should treat as wrappers. See Wrappers.

$CVSREAD

If this is set, checkout and update will try hard to make the files in your working directory read-only. When this is not set, the default behavior is to permit modification of your working files.

$CVSUMASK

Controls permissions of files in the repository. See File permissions.

$CVSROOT

Should contain the full pathname to the root of the CVS source repository (where the RCS files are kept). This information must be available to CVS for most commands to execute; if $CVSROOT is not set, or if you wish to override it for one invocation, you can supply it on the command line: ‘cvs -d cvsroot cvs_command…’ Once you have checked out a working directory, CVS stores the appropriate root (in the file CVS/Root), so normally you only need to worry about this when initially checking out a working directory.

$CVSEDITOR

$EDITOR

$VISUAL

Specifies the program to use for recording log messages during commit. $CVSEDITOR overrides $EDITOR, which overrides $VISUAL. See Committing your changes for more or Global options for alternative ways of specifying a log editor.

$PATH

If $RCSBIN is not set, and no path is compiled into CVS, it will use $PATH to try to find all programs it uses.

$HOME

$HOMEPATH

$HOMEDRIVE

Used to locate the directory where the .cvsrc file, and other such files, are searched. On Unix, CVS just checks for HOME. On Windows NT, the system will set HOMEDRIVE, for example to ‘d:’ and HOMEPATH, for example to \joe. On Windows 95, you’ll probably need to set HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH yourself.

$CVS_RSH

Specifies the external program which CVS connects with, when :ext: access method is specified. see Connecting via rsh.

$CVS_SSH

Specifies the external program which CVS connects with, when :extssh: access method is specified. see Connecting via rsh.

$CVS_SERVER

Used in client-server mode when accessing a remote repository using RSH. It specifies the name of the program to start on the server side (and any necessary arguments) when accessing a remote repository using the :ext:, :fork:, or :server: access methods. The default value for :ext: and :server: is cvs; the default value for :fork: is the name used to run the client. see Connecting via rsh

$CVS_PASSFILE

Used in client-server mode when accessing the cvs login server. Default value is $HOME/.cvspass. see Password authentication client

$CVS_CLIENT_PORT

Used in client-server mode to set the port to use when accessing the server via Kerberos, GSSAPI, or CVS’s password authentication protocol if the port is not specified in the CVSROOT. see Remote repositories

$CVS_RCMD_PORT

Used in client-server mode. If set, specifies the port number to be used when accessing the RCMD demon on the server side. (Currently not used for Unix clients).

$CVS_CLIENT_LOG

Used for debugging only in client-server mode. If set, everything sent to the server is logged into $CVS_CLIENT_LOG.in and everything sent from the server is logged into $CVS_CLIENT_LOG.out.

$CVS_SERVER_SLEEP

Used only for debugging the server side in client-server mode. If set, delays the start of the server child process the specified amount of seconds so that you can attach to it with a debugger.

$CVS_IGNORE_REMOTE_ROOT

For CVS 1.10 and older, setting this variable prevents CVS from overwriting the CVS/Root file when the ‘-d’ global option is specified. Later versions of CVS do not rewrite CVS/Root, so CVS_IGNORE_REMOTE_ROOT has no effect.

$COMSPEC

Used under OS/2 only. It specifies the name of the command interpreter and defaults to CMD.EXE.

$TMPDIR

$TMP

$TEMP

Directory in which temporary files are located. The CVS server uses TMPDIR. See Global options, for a description of how to specify this. Some parts of CVS will always use /tmp (via the tmpnam function provided by the system).

On Windows NT, TMP is used (via the _tempnam function provided by the system).

The patch program which is used by the CVS client uses TMPDIR, and if it is not set, uses /tmp (at least with GNU patch 2.1). Note that if your server and client are both running CVS 1.9.10 or later, CVS will not invoke an external patch program.