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2.1 Telling CVS where your repository is

There are several ways to tell CVS where to find the repository. You can name the repository on the command line explicitly, with the -d (for "directory") option:

$ cvs -d /usr/local/cvsroot checkout yoyodyne/tc

Or you can set the $CVSROOT environment variable to an absolute path to the root of the repository, ‘/usr/local/cvsroot’ in this example. To set $CVSROOT, csh and tcsh users should have this line in their ‘.cshrc’ or ‘.tcshrc’ files:

setenv CVSROOT /usr/local/cvsroot

sh and bash users should instead have these lines in their ‘.profile’ or ‘.bashrc’:

CVSROOT=/usr/local/cvsroot
export CVSROOT

A repository specified with -d will override the $CVSROOT environment variable. Once you've checked a working copy out from the repository, it will remember where its repository is (the information is recorded in the ‘CVS/Root’ file in the working copy).

The -d option and the ‘CVS/Root’ file both override the $CVSROOT environment variable. If -d option differs from ‘CVS/Root’, the former is used. Of course, for proper operation they should be two ways of referring to the same repository.