- how to uncompress perforce Depot files?
The files I have now ending with [,v] and some files end with [,d] containing [1.1.gz].
What i did In details:
In P4V I created a Workspace, put some important files, Submitted it to the Depot then decided to delete what's in the Depot by clicking Mark for Delete it just mark it with a red X what I think, So I head to C:\Program Files\Perforce\Server\depot and deleting it from there, now the files in the Recycle Bin but doing so doesn't make it disappear from P4V so I opened P4Abmin in the Depot tap I did Obliterate and its gone finally.
Later discovered that Marking files for Delete in the Depot delets it from the Workspace, and only thing that I have is what I restored from the Recycle Bin and it's compressed files, how can I uncompress it.
Don't touch the Perforce server's depot or db files unless you know what you're doing -- normally the server handles the job of managing those files and the relationships between them, and randomly messing with those files will usually break things, much like if you randomly shuffled blocks on your hard disk around without knowing how your filesystem works. I mention this first so that you'll know for next time, and second so that if you happen to have access to a time machine, you can fix this problem by going back and informing your past self to keep their paws out of P4ROOT. :)
If in the future you want to temporarily delete files from the depot, use the normal "Mark for Delete" command in P4V (or p4 delete in the CLI) followed by "Submit". If you want to permanently delete them, that's what the "obliterate" command is for. In neither case should you be deleting files out from under the server -- everything should happen from the client (that is, P4V, the p4 CLI, P4Win, etc).
If you restore the deleted files to exactly where they were, you should be able to rely on Perforce to get the files back, provided you have not already obliterated them from the db. (Hopefully obliterate noticed the archive files were gone and it failed with an error instead of blasting the db entries...)
If you no longer have the db entries for the files, you can try to extract the archives manually with command line tools (luckily the content isn't encrypted or in a weird proprietary format) -- you should be able to gunzip the .gz files and co (RCS) the ,v files. I'd expect most unzip utilities to understand gzip, but RCS is a pretty old format so you may have to do a little digging to find Windows tools for it (I think Cygwin may have RCS tools bundled with it). Good luck!
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I recently lost a lot of files, due to a hard disk error, but still have a Perforce folder containing files from a particular project. Trouble is, it's not the actual project files, but some kind of Perforce storage format, with files ending in ",d" and ",v"
Is there any way I can restore the original files from what I have?
I imagined Perforce would be able to open the folder as a depot, and I'd simply be able to get the files into a new workspace, but I can't see any way to open an existing depot. I tried editing the depot's "Storage location for versioned files" to point at the folder, but the depot still shows as empty.
I only used Perforce briefly (comparing it to Git) so I don't really understand how it works. Any help or advice would be much appreciated.
The thing you're missing is the database (the db.* files), which need to be in the server root (P4ROOT) when you start the server. If you don't have database files in P4ROOT, the server will create an empty database on startup. The database is the source of truth for a Perforce server, so if it's empty, the server is empty.
If you have a checkpoint (a file called checkpoint.N) and/or journal file, that contains the metadata you need to reconstruct the database; recover the server with p4d -jr checkpoint.N journal, and then you can use the p4 depot command to make sure the Map of your depot(s) points at the directory where your archive files are, and use other commands to inspect the actual files (start with p4 verify to see which files are in the database but missing/corrupted in the archive backup).
If you only have the archive files but no database (and no checkpoint or journal to recover it from), you're in a more difficult spot since the database is what maps the archive files into the actual depot structure (e.g. it includes all the copy-by-reference pointers that constitute branches in Perforce). However, you can extract the contents of the archive files one file at a time using conventional tools; the ,v files are in RCS format (use the co command to retrieve their content), and the ,d directories contain regular old .gz files, one per revision.
Using the deep magic to synthesize a database from the archive files on their own is also a possibility, but the RCS/CVS conversion scripts are so old I'd expect a lot of fiddling to be required to get them working with a current version of Perforce.
I do not want to go "Get Revision" > "Force". Because half of my stuff is already downloaded. I don't want to overwrite what I already have. P4V Can clearly see that what is in the depot and what is local is completely different. How can I get Perforce to retrieve the files I do not have, and ignore the ones I already do?
Select your workspace root, go to File > Open Command Window Here, and run:
p4 clean
This will scan your workspace and force-sync everything that's different or missing, as well as deleting unadded files. Note that if you have local work that isn't in a changelist, this will irrevocably erase it. If you only want to "clean" files that are edited/present but out of date (and disregard added/deleted files), do p4 clean -e instead. If you want to preview the operation before doing it for real, do p4 clean -n.
I think you can do the equivalent via the "Reconcile Offline Work" tool in P4V, but it may require additional manual steps.
To make working with Perforce easier, try to avoid modifying files in your workspace that are read-only -- if you want to remove a file from your workspace, use "remove from workspace" in P4V rather than manually deleting it, etc. Perforce is able to make file operations very fast by virtue of knowing what's in your workspace and not having to re-check it each time, but you eliminate that benefit when you mess with your workspace manually.
Instead of p4 clean, you could do:
reconcile offline work on root of workspace then a pop-up saying that you deleted some files and it is going to delete them from Depot of the server as well make sure you added to default or new changelist or whatever. Accept.
Go to changelist and right-click press revert files to bring back the deleted/missing files.
I have accidentally added a few folders to my default changelist that I don't want to submit to the server. How can I move these changes to another changelist, or remove them from the changelist without affecting the files on disk?
I have created a new changelist and moved some individual files / changes to this list but the folder contains many autogenerated files and this will take too long to do file by file.
I also looked at using the "revert" option but I think some of these files may have been previously added to the server in error. Reverting seems like it will change these files on disk to the previous server version.
You can specify the folder path in "Find File".
And use "*" to match all files in the contains filed.
Now you can select all the files in your folder by using "Ctrl+A"
From P4V you can multi-select the files in the pending changes window and then drag them into a new changelist. If they're all in the same directory they'll all be grouped together since it's sorted by depot path.
If you just want to have them not be open but also not modify them on disk, go to the command line and do:
p4 revert -k //depot/path/...
The -k option lets you keep your local files. This isn't available from P4V as far as I know (since it leaves your workspace out of sync with the depot state, it's usually a bad idea).
If you have generated files in your workspace that aren't supposed to go into the depot, you should exclude them from your client's View, e.g.:
View:
//depot/... //myclient/...
-//depot/path_to_generated_files/... //myclient/path_to_generated_files/...
This will essentially "hide" these files from all Perforce operations; you will never be able to add files from this workspace path, and if somebody else adds files to that depot path, you won't sync them down to your workspace. Two notes on this:
If you already have some of these files in the depot and they're currently synced, excluding them from your view and then syncing your client will remove them from your client. You can use sync -k, much like revert -k, to keep your local copies while telling the server that your client is properly up to date.
If you're using streams, you can do this for ALL clients of the stream by adding an Ignored path.
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.
Can I rename a folder in Perforce from //depot/FooBar/ to //depot/Foobar/?
I've tried this by renaming from //depot/FooBar/ to //depot/Temp/ to //Depot/Foobar/ but the end result ends up the same as //depot/FooBar/.
Once it is in Perforce, the case remains set. As mentioned by Johan you can obliterate, set the name up correctly, and add it in again. However, there is a slight gotcha....
If anyone else (running Windows) has already synced the wrong-cased version, then when they sync again the right one, it will not change the case on their PC. This is a peculiarity of the Windows file system acknowledging case but still being fundamentally case-independent.
If a number of users have synced, and it is not convenient to get them to remove-from-client too (and blasting the folders from their machines), then you can resort to a dark and dirty Perforce technique called "Checkpoint surgery". It's not for the fainthearted, but you do this:
Stop your server, take a checkpoint.
Using your favourite text editor that can handle multi-megabyte files, search & replace all occurances of the old case name with the new. You could of course use a script too.
Replay your checkpoint file to recreate the Perforce database meta data.
Restart your server.
This will affect all user client specs transparently, and so when they sync they will get the right case as if by magic.
It sounds hairy, but I've had to do it before and as long as you take care, backup, do a trial run etc, then all should be OK.
Maybe not needed anymore, but here's the official Perforce HowTo about changing file cases on Windows and Unix: http://answers.perforce.com/articles/KB/3448/?q=change+file+case
I'm not sure about directories, but we've had this problem with files. To fix it, we have to delete the file, submit that change, then p4 add the file with the correct case and submit the second change. Once that's done, unix users who have sync'ed the incorrect-case file have to p4 sync, then physically delete the file (because p4 won't update the case) and then p4 sync -f the file.
Our server is on Windows, so that might make a difference.
I guess it treats files and folders the same.
For files:
It depends (on whether you have a Windows or Unix server). We have this problem with our Windows perforce server (which versions our Java code), where very occasionally someone will check in a file with a case problem (this then causes compile errors because it's Java). The only way to fix this is to obliterate the file and resubmit it with the correct case.
I think you should remove the Perforce Cache, so that your modification can be shown.
You can rename with ABC rename to abc_TMP, then abc_TMP rename to abc, then clear cache.
Setps to clear cache:
Open windows user home folder (on windows7 ==> C:\Users\)
Locate the folder called ".p4qt"
Rename the folder to "old.p4qt"
Launch Perforce, now everything works!
NOTE: these steps will rest your default setting.
The question is over 3 years old, but I ran into an issue like this while doing a Subversion import into Perforce and figured the info I got could be useful to some. It's similar to the obliterate method, but helps you retain history. You use the duplicate command that may not have been available back then to retain the history. The process basically being:
Duplicate to temporary location.
Obliterate the location you just duplicated.
Duplicate from the temporary location to the renamed case location.
Obliterate the temporary location.
Through this you retain the history of file changes, but get them all in the new path as well. Unfortunately there will be no history of the path case change, but that seems to be unavoidable. Similar to other methods mentioned here, users will need to either manually rename the directories in their workspace or delete and re-sync to get the new path name.
Also, P4V caches the paths it shows in the tree so after doing this it may still show up as the old name. a p4 dirs command however will show the new case.