Question

I’m trying to move my CVS repo to git. I’ve imported all the CVS history to git, but I just need to move across all the changed/new files. Is there an easy way to do this? I’m using debian linux, so would prefer command line tools.

Answer 1

I finally found a way to grab the changed files and copy them into another directory:

cvs -qn update -d 2>/dev/null | grep '^[M|\?|P] ' | awk '{print $2}' > files.list
while read file; do cp -r -f --parents "$file" /tmp/dest/; done < files.list

Basically, cvs -qn update -d does a mock update (doesn’t change files), piped to grep to only list the changed files, use awk to exclude the M, P, ? etc, output to a file.

Loop over the lines in the new file using the cp –parents to preserve directory structure