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."
Related
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.
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've got a very large depot synced to my workstation, I'm trying to get a few more computers up to date without requiring them to sync as well. We've copied over all the files from my computer into their working directories and are trying to get perforce to recognize that they already have these files at a specific revision.
It sounds like flush is what we're looking for, but it doesn't seem to be working. What I'm trying is:
p4 flush //ourdepotname/...#123456
However nothing changes. If I add:
p4 flush -f //ourdepotname/...#123456
then I'll see all my files are recognized as version 0/x in p4v now.
Is flush not what we need? How can we get P4 to recognize that we already have all the files locally at revision 123456?
I was indicating a revision when I meant to indicate a change list.
p4 flush //ourdepotname/...#123456
Thanks to Sam Stafford for clarification.
I'm trying to open an existing Perforce application. I made some local changes, like deleting files, which I want to undo (that is, I want my local copy to exactly match the repository once more -- delete added files, restore deleted files, and undo changes).
When I try to revert using the p4v gui client, I see this error:
file(s) not opened on this client
What am I doing wrong?
I did manage to revert all the changed files, but not the added/removed files.
Edit: I did the following:
Connect to a Perforce server using p4v
Map a directory to my local file system (lets say C:\Perforce)
Get the latest version of the repository
Go to C:\Perforce in Windows Explorer
Delete some files and folders
Add some files and folders
I would like to get back to the "pristine" state, the copy of exactly what's on the server when I got the latest version of the repository for the first time.
By the looks of the edited description you added and deleted files directly on the filesystem and not through perforce. Therefore Perforce doesn't know anything about those changes so there is nothing to revert. Typically when you want to add a file you use 'p4 add" (or the equivalent p4v operation), and when you delete, you should use 'p4 delete' (or again, the equivalent p4v operation).
Really, the best option to get back to a pristine state is to nuke the local copy of the code in c:\perforce (in windows explorer), go to p4v, right click the area you want to sync, and choose "Get Revision..." and in the subsequent dialog, make sure that the "force operation" checkbox is checked. This will tell Perforce that you want a new copy of everything regardless of whether you had it synced or not.
You can also run "reconcile offline work" in p4v. Right click the depot area and choose that option. It will scan through the local folder structure and give you a report of what files have been added that don't exist in perforce, what files were deleted, and what files were modified. From that dialog, you can right click on local files that don't exist in perforce and delete them, or you can 'p4 add' them. You can also sync deleted files.
HTH.
Just an extra not to point out another cause for this.
If the file name contains an unusual character that cannot be translated correctly the name on the client will never match that on the server.
The solution in this case is to spot that character in the file name (it will be a question mark emblem on Linux) and use a wildcard to help identify the file to the server so it can delete it etc (p4 deleting the file is a way to go).
This answer may not be your case. This happened to me when I edited the files on my local disk without logging into p4.
A quick fix at commandline is:
p4 login # make sure you've logged in
p4 edit <filename> # let p4 know you've edited the file
p4 revert <filename> # revert to "pristine" state
You can use p4 reconcile -w to restore your client to the state of the server. There is an alias called clean, which is also available in P4V on the right-click context menu as Clean....
There are several additional flags to control whether added and deleted files are deleted or restored, respectively.
The -w flag forces the workspace files to be updated to match the
depot rather than opening them so that the depot can be updated to
match the workspace. The -a, -d, and -e flags when used with -w
update workspace files as follows:
-a Files with no corresponding depot file are deleted.
-d Depot files not in the workspace are added.
-e Modified files are restored to the last version synced.