I originally wrote this for a group of students doing a project at the University of Kent; the commands described below should be enough to get you started with CVS, and you can refer to the other documentation for more information.
The best resource I've found for CVS is Open Source Development With CVS, informally "The CVS Book". (It's also available as a real book, but all the important information is there.) I suggest you have a read through that, since it'll cover this stuff in far more depth. At the very least, make sure you read An Overview Of CVS, since that explains in a couple of pages what terms like "repository" mean. For these instructions, I'm assuming you're working on a shared Unix-like system; there's nothing to stop you from keeping a working copy on your machine and using CVS over ssh to get at the shared repository, however (see below). CVS for Windows is available for free from Cygwin.
Basic CVS operations
Suppose you have a CVS repository in
/usr/local/proj/co508/project/hserver/repos. To use this directly from
the machine it's on, you'll need to set your CVSROOT environment
variable appropriately; if you're using bash type:
export CVSROOT=/usr/local/proj/co508/project/hserver/repos
To create a new repository (you won't need to do this unless you want to play
with CVS in a new repository, for instance on your own machine, in which case
you should set CVSROOT differently):
cvs init
To import a tree of files into a new CVS project, first change into the
directory that you want to import, then do this (projname should be a
short name for the project, vendortag will probably be your username;
releasetag should probably be start):
cvs import projname vendortag releasetag
Note that this, like many CVS commands, will pop up an editor asking for comments on the checkin. The default editor will probably be vi; if you don't like vi (and I don't blame you), then type something like this to use a different editor:
export EDITOR=pico
To check out a working copy of project projname (into a directory called
projname):
cvs checkout projname
To get the latest changes from the repository into your copy (it won't
overwrite any files you've modified -- it'll print an M by your
modified files):
cvs update
update will also tell you about any conflicts between your changes and changes other people have made to the repository in the mean time.
To show the differences between your working copy and the repository in "context diff" format (see the cvsbook for more details):
cvs -Q diff -c
To check ("commit") your changes back into the repository:
cvs commit
To view the CVS log entries:
cvs log
To add a new file to the project:
cvs add somefile
cvs commit somefile
To add a new empty directory to the project:
mkdir somedir
cvs add somedir
To remove a file from the project:
rm somefile
cvs remove somefile
cvs commit somefile
(Likewise for a directory; you must remove all the files in it first.)
Renaming files in CVS needs a change to be made by hand in the repository; you probably won't need to do this very often, but the procedure is described in the cvsbook.
Using CVS over a network link via SSH
To run CVS on your machine, assuming your username is xyz5, you'll
need to do something like:
export CVS_RSH=ssh
export CVSROOT=:ext:xyz5@raptor.ukc.ac.uk:/usr/local/proj/co508/project/hserver/repos
then the normal CVS commands will work as they do on the shared machine. You will probably want to set up an ssh keypair so you don't have to type your password for each command.