Like most command-line programs, AccuRev’s CLI tool,
accurev, accepts one or more filename/pathname specifications as command arguments:
But several accurev commands are capable of operating on
all the files in the current workspace. For example, this command searches the entire workspace containing the current working directory, and lists the files that have not been placed under version control (
external files):
Such “whole-workspace” commands are very powerful and useful, but they can be time-consuming. If your workspace contains many hundreds or thousands of files, you must wait while all the names are transmitted to the server machine, the AccuRev Server process determines the status of each file, and information on the matching files is returned to the client machine.
This large list of files to be processed may contain a significant number of “don’t care” files. For example, a search for external files is probably intended to locate source files (with suffixes like
.c or
.cc or
.java or
.bas) that you’ve forgotten to place under version control. You probably don’t care about program-generated files with suffixes like
.exe (executables built in the source directory),
.bak (editor backup files),
.msg (copies of mail messages, and so on — because you don’t intend to place them under version control.
You can use the environment variable ACCUREV_IGNORE_ELEMS to specify up to 50 patterns (or even individual filenames/pathnames). When it executes certain “whole-workspace” commands, the
accurev tool ignores all external files that match this specification. For example, setting
ACCUREV_IGNORE_ELEMS to the following value causes the
stat –x command to ignore all
.exe and
.bak files:
ACCUREV_IGNORE_ELEMS is also used — in a slightly different way — by certain commands that process a particular set of files, instead of the whole workspace.
AccuRev now supports specification of objects to be ignored on a per-directory basis, using configuration files, in addition to the global specification in environment variable
ACCUREV_IGNORE_ELEMS. The following sections explain the details of using the environment variable and the configuration files.