I have a large perforce client already synced. I realized that I'll only be working on a sub directory of the larger root folder I synced to.
Old p4 client specs
//Depot/largeFolder/... //Clinet/largeFolder/...
New p4 client
//Depot/largeFolder/samllSubDir/... //Clinet/largeFolder/smallSubDir/...
Now when I perform a p4 sync perforce doesn't remove the other folders which I don't want in my client.
I'm hesitant to do a p4 sync -f since I have files edited in the /largeFolder/smallSubDir/. I don't want them to get reset.
What is the right way to sync my client so that the other folders which are not in the new mapping are removed?
Note: My real mapping is complicated and deleting folders by hand is not realistic.
In the typical case, re-syncing a narrowed client will indeed remove the unmapped files. You don't say what happens when you try to do a sync (are there error messages?), so I can't say for certain what's going on, but these are the two first possibilities that come to mind:
Opened files will not be touched by a sync, ever. You need to revert them -- use the -k flag if you want to revert the files but keep your local copies, and then use the -k flag on sync as well so that it will continue to not touch them (while marking them as having been synced, or in this case un-synced).
Writable files will by default be left alone by a sync, and produce "can't clobber" warnings. Doing sync -k should suffice here if you want to keep the local files. Doing sync -f will blow away the local files even if they were modified (but only if they're not also open for edit -- see above).
Useful commands to run if you're trying to debug (pick any file that's not getting [un]synced that you think should be):
p4 sync <file> -- do you get an error message that tells you why the file isn't being removed?
p4 where <file> -- is the client mapping for that file not what you think it is?
p4 opened <file> -- is the file opened?
p4 have <file> -- did you even sync this file in the first place?
p4 files <file> -- does this file even exist in the depot?
Note that the fact that opened files will not be touched by a p4 sync means that your edited files will be safe from a sync -f, provided that you actually opened them for edit. If you didn't, run a p4 reconcile and then p4 sync -f is perfectly safe -- but if you don't get to the root cause first (i.e. are the unwanted files also opened for edit?), it might not be helpful either.
Related
My p4 client version is P4/NTX64/2018.1/1705517.
I noticed that some files had accidentally been deleted in my workspace. I synced, but even so, the files did not appear.
I then ran the p4 have command and saw that it contained the missing files, and so p4 will not include those files in the sync.
Of course I can give the p4 sync command with the -f flag, but my workspace is rather large, so that would take a long time.
I then ran the flush command even with the -f flag thinking that it would correct my have list to reflect what I actually had on the filesystem of my workspace, but it didn't. What am I doing wrong?
p4 flush changes the have list to match whatever you tell it to match (if no arguments, then #head is the default). If that's not what your workspace actually contains, then the have list is now out of sync with the workspace, and future p4 sync commands will probably skip a bunch of files (exactly like you're seeing now).
The command you want is p4 clean, which syncs your workspace to match your have list. (If you have changes in unopened files, including "new" files that you haven't opened with p4 add, this will irrevocably blast them. Careful!)
If you want to open the files that don't match your have list, use p4 reconcile instead. (You can follow it up with p4 revert to discard the changes, or p4 submit to keep them permanently.)
In P4, I only want to pull file changed my client workspace from server. But When I use "p4 sync", this command get all files from server. So, How to get files changed from list revision ? with the files were existed on local and not changed, the command P4 sync do not need sync. My command is here:
p4 sync -f //depot/...#Revision
If you want to restore a file you deleted with p4 delete file, use p4 revert file, not p4 sync. p4 sync is for getting the changes that other people made to the files, not for altering the changes that you made.
There are three different reasons that the files in your workspace might differ from the current head revision in the depot:
A new revision has been submitted to the depot since the last time you synced.
You have opened the files (e.g. with p4 edit) and made changes to them that are not yet submitted.
You have modified the read-only synced files in your workspace without opening them.
(You don't say in your question which of these is the case, which is why you've gotten a couple of different answers that are based on different assumptions about your workspace state -- I'm guessing it's #3, personally, but I'll give the answer for each one so you can understand how it's "supposed" to work vs what's actually going on here.)
In case 1, a normal p4 sync command will update only the files with new revisions. If the revision you previously synced is the same as the head revision, p4 sync won't update it. This makes p4 sync very fast -- you can have a million files in your workspace, and if only one of them has changed since you last sync, only that one file is affected.
In case 2, no p4 sync command will update the files, in the interest of preserving your open changes. To submit your changes to the depot, use p4 submit; to discard them, use p4 revert. Again, only the open files are affected by these commands, so a revert operation affecting only a few files isn't slowed down by however many other files are in your workspace.
In case 3, your workspace is in an inconsistent state -- Perforce's standard workflow is that any time you modify a local file you should "open" it so that the server can track your local work (and optimize operations like sync, submit, etc, as well as alert other users who open those files simultaneously to potential conflicts). If you modify a file locally without modifying it, commands like sync will no longer work as well because the state of your client is not known to the server.
You can recover from an inconsistent state by using the p4 reconcile command (which will open all the inconsistent files so that you can either submit or revert them), or the p4 clean command (which irrevocably discards the inconsistent local changes, as if you'd done p4 reconcile immediately followed by p4 revert). These commands are significantly slower than a normal sync operation since they need to scan the entire workspace rather than only the changed files, but they are still significantly faster than a sync -f since only the changed files are actually re-transferred.
I have a lot of files within the file structure of the perforce depot that I am unable to see with the perforce clients p4 command line or p4v gui even when logged in as admin.
I have tried to find any meta data I can through p4 files and p4 filelog commands but it always returns:
"- no such file(s)."
Also I have run p4 verify and p4 dbverify to see if there we were any errors on the server but they returned no errors. There just seems to be no records of the files except for the fact that they are taking up room on the HDD.
My current theory is that they are from failed commits but I do not know how to get perforce to acknowledge the files so I can obliterate them.
Background info:
This is a simple perforce setup with just the main depot and an archive depot for old projects. (The mystery files are in the main depot)
The server version is: P4D/NTX64/2012.2/551823 (2012/11/09).
There isn't necessarily a one-to-one mapping between what's in the server's depot filesystem and the actual structure of the depot as defined in the metadata -- depot revisions are written once and are not moved or duplicated even if they're moved or duplicated from the point of view of the client. So you definitely shouldn't make the assumption that because a given file in the depot filesystem doesn't correspond to a depot file path that it's not actually providing the underlying storage for some other existing file (especially if you've used obliterate on some branches of a file while leaving others intact -- the remaining archive file may be the content for one of the ones you left).
That said, it is also possible for archives to become "orphaned" as part of a failed submit as you suggest. If the amount of space involved is small I'd suggest not worrying about it (the orphaned files won't cause any problems in terms of collisions), but if it's important to be able to clean them up, your best bet is to use "snap -n" to make sure there aren't any of those dependencies and then delete them manually (just to be safe I'd keep a backup of them at least until you've run your next verify to make sure nothing important has gone missing). Run:
p4 snap -n //... //depot/path/to/mystery/file
This says "show me files anywhere in the depot (//...) with archive dependencies on //depot/path/to/mystery/file". If you run the command without the -n it will actually break those dependencies by making physical copies (don't do this if you're worried about space since you'll end up with N redundant copies of the archive).
The inverse of p4 snap -n (i.e. "where does the archive for this depot file live?") is p4 fstat -Oc //depot/file.
I'm updating a locally modified file with the server revision so that I have all the latest changes (that other developers made while I was working on the file). I've already tried p4 sync. Does anyone know the correct way to do deal with this?
Thanks
If the file is opened for edit, and you have already run 'p4 sync', then you should have seen a message like:
$ p4 sync
//depot/main/b#2 - is opened and not being changed
... //depot/main/b - must resolve #2 before submitting
What this means is that Perforce is ready for you to merge your changes together with the changes from the new revision.
Perforce calls this process "resolving" the changes, and has told you that you must resolve them before submitting the file.
When you are ready to merge your changes with the new changes from the new revision, run:
$ p4 resolve
Many people find this process of merging the changes a bit complicated, and prefer to use a GUI tool. Try downloading the P4V tool from the Perforce website and it will help you merge the changes using a visual merge tool.
If you instead decide that you do not want to keep your local changes, and would prefer to discard them, and use the latest version of the file instead, you can discard your changes by running:
$ p4 revert
But be careful! This will lose all the unsubmitted changes that you have made to your file! The same is true of the 'sync -f' command and the 'p4 clean' command; these commands tell Perforce that you don't want your locally-made unsubmitted changes, and Perforce should replace the file with a clean copy from the server.
I will add more detail on Bryan's answer especially about all sequence of syncing, and fixing merge conflicts; assume that this is based on CLI p4.
Let's say you have locally modified files that upstream also has some updates for the same files since you've modified it locally.
Sanity steps I would do is the following
p4 sync -n :: with -n this is dry-run which it won't actually have any effect or perform anything yet, but will return output if it really performs. For the specific situation we're in right now, you probably want to look for the line that has ... in front + the line above it which says is opened and not being changed. With our situation, this means upstream files has updates for the file you've opened and probably made some changes to it. It needs to be resolved.
At this point, you can execute p4 sync to actually perform it.
p4 resolve -n :: again with -n which means dry-run. This is to check whether there's any outstanding conflicts you need to resolve as the result of your sync.
(if the output from 3. is not No file(s) to resolve.) p4 resolve -am :: this will perform conflict resolution automatically. It will try merging but will not do anything if there's any merge conflicts for target file. Its output will list out the result of each file. For files that it leaves out, there will be non-zero conflicts in the output.
p4 resolve -af :: perform merging manually. Its output will list out files (of course with their path).
From 5, edit each files as seen in the output. Search for ORIGINAL or THEIRS or YOURS then delete unwanted section, or merge things together as needed. When finish for each file, just save and quit. Do this for all files.
PS. More info for 6. Actually you can specify which merging resolution policy you want it to happen in which it can be
p4 resolve -at :: accept changes from upstream (accept THEIRS)
p4 resolve -ay :: ignore changes from upstream, only accept what you have locally (accept YOURS)
Also keep in mind, THEIRS doesn't need to always be upstream changes from depot, but if can mean a changelist that you just unshelved into your workspace locally.
If you do a sync in perforce it can happen, very often, to do nothing even if it should. If you do a forced sync (sync -f) it will definitely sync all the files from the server blindly and this is unacceptable if you have a big project.
The question is how can you do a fast sync?
The key part to your question is "even if it should". Without fail, in all my (too) many years of experience with Perforce, users who revert to forced syncs habitually, because a normal sync does not do what they expect, are not using Perforce correctly.
You must let Perforce manage your hard disk for you - the server knows which versions of which files you have, and so a normal sync just gets what it needs. If it fails, then that is almost without exception a sign that the user is modifying, deleting, adding, renaming files outside of Perforce (e.g. in Explorer).
Sometimes you may get a system funny (i.e. PC fault, ) that causes this, so it is not necessarily the users fault. But these are very rare - hence my "habitually" qualifier above.
If you think, hand on heart, that you are not doing anything out of the ordinary, then start to look at what other processes could be tweaking these files. E.g. does you build system do something odd, and try to modify files as it builds? Do you have an open network share that perhaps someone else is inadvertently poking? Do you have a backup system that is interfering?
Hope that helps.
As mentioned by the other answers, you need to create a separate client (workspace) for every "instance" of a directory tree synced from the depot.
If you want to force-sync only those files that have changed from the depot:
p4 diff -se ... | p4 -x - sync -f
p4 diff -sd ... | p4 -x - sync -f
Warning: that will overwrite any locally changed files (in the current directory and subdirectories).
If instead you edited some files and forgot to open them for edit first, you can do this:
p4 diff -se ... | p4 -x - edit
which will open for edit any file that's different from the depot.
And this:
p4 diff -sd ... | p4 -x - delete
will open for delete any file that was locally deleted.
If you create an inconsistency, where perforce looses track of what is going on in your workspace, you should use the "Reconcile offline work..." function (in P4V).
This will run a folder diff and tell you what options you have to resolve the inconsistencies.
In general, make sure that you always check out files explicitly through perforce (open for edit). This feels strange if you are used to other systems.
I believe that the command you're looking for is p4 clean.
From: http://www.perforce.com/perforce/r14.2/manuals/cmdref/p4_clean.html
"Files present in the workspace, but missing from the depot are deleted from the workspace.
Files present in the depot, but missing from your workspace. The version of the files that have been synced from the depot are added to your workspace.
Files modified in your workspace that have not been checked in are restored to the last version synced from the depot."