Scrubbing data from CVS repository

[Scott Gifford]

Hello,

We've been CVS to manage an internal project for a while now.  The
repository was completely private, and so some of the support scripts
contained hardcoded passwords.

We are now interested in opening up our repository to other
developers.  We will obviously remove the passwords from the source
files and put them into a configuration file maintained outside of
CVS.

My question is, can I safely scrub the passwords from the existing CVS
repository?  For example, if I just replaced passwords with the same
number of asterisks in all of the ,v files in the CVS directory with
something like this:

    find ~/cvs -type f |xargs perl -pi 's/my_password/***********/g' *

Could that damage anything, or is it relatively safe?  And will it
have the effect I want, which is to make any version of the project
checked out contain asterisks instead of the password?

Thanks!

---Scott.