Re: Does "cvs update" return anything?

[Matthew Riechers]

Dorthe Luebbert wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I wrote a script in Perl to update a directory tree with several
> installations of the same cvs module.
> The script traverses the directory tree, whenever it reaches the
> searched directory it updates with "cvs update". The problem is that the
> script works fast and the cvs server cannot stand the amount of requests
> (hypothesis). I wonder if
> a) "cvs update" returns anything (like "connection was not successfull")

CVS does return an error code. For a quick example, (in sh) do 'cvs
update' and then 'echo $?' ($? is the error code from the last process),
first in a checked-out directory, then in one w/o any working dirs. The
first echo should give you '0', the second should be '1'. You can use
this as the return value, 0 being no errors.

> b) I can pipe the cvs update result anywhere (cvs update | grep
> "connection refused" --> does one not work...) :-(

You are only grepping stdout by default. Errors conventionally show up
on stderr, not stdout. You need to redirect stderr into stdout, or log
each seperately. I can't recall how to do that in perl, but in sh you
can have a log for each file descriptor: 'cvs update > /normal_msgs.log
2> /error_msgs.log' (2 being stderr), or you can reassign one into the
other: 'cvs update > /big.log 2>&1' (stderr is reassigned to stdout).
For pipes, you have to redirect before the pipe: 'cvs update 2>&1 |grep
"error"'.

> 
> I just want to find out wether the cvs update was successful or not and
> stop the script in case it was not.
> 

It may be easier to just log/grep all errors and let the script finish,
and then dump the error log to the screen to show what failed. You can
also try sleep() or equivalent between updates to ease the load on the
server.

> Thanx for your help
> 
>  Dorthe

HTH

-Matt