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Command Line Interface Reference
This is an easy introduction to the fossil command line interface
(cli). It assumes some familiarity with using the command line, and
with Source Code Maintenence (SCM) systems—but not too
much.
If you are trying to find information about fossil's web
capabilities, see the Fossil Home and
Fossil Wiki pages for pointers.
Things to note
* Fossil cli commands do not use special delimeters, they use
spaces. This is traditional with VCS/SCM. Some options to
fossil commands do use special delimiters, particularly the
'-' (hyphen, or dash) character. This is very similar to Tcl.
Think of fossil as a shell you invoke and feed a command to,
including any options, and it will make more sense.
* Any fossil command is acceptable once enough of it has been
entered to make the intent unambiguous. 'clo' is a proper prefix of
both the 'clone' and 'close' commands, for instance, but 'clon' is
enough to make the intent—the 'clone'
command—unambiguous.
* Pragmatically, a version
in fossil is a 40-character long string of hexadecimal.
fossil will be able to figure out which version you want
with any distinct prefix of that string which is at
least four characters long. Commands which require a
version are looking for the string, a distinct prefix of the
string, or a tag.
* SCM in a distributed environment can be a bit confusing with
regard to branching, merging, and versions in general. See the
explanation of branching and it will all make
much more sense.
* Op.Ed. An excellent way to learn to use fossil
effectively is to
clone the repository for fossil
itself. You can then poke around using the fossil ui
command, and look things up with no connection worries. You can
set up test repositories and try things out on-the-fly to see how
they work, using their own ui's. The CLI will far easier to
understand if you can run a repository, watch it in a browser, and
hack around with it in a simplified environment (your tests) with
guaranteed and fast access to the sources & docs (your cloned fossil
repository).
You should probably start interacting with fossil at the command
line by asking it what it can
do: ˆ
$ fossil help
This will generate output in the form:
Usage: fossil help COMMAND.
Available COMMANDs:
This is fossil version [a89b436bc9] 2009-02-11 05:00:02 UTC
This information can also viewed in the fossil gui using the url
PROJEKT-BASEURL/help. You'll see a web page, listing all
available commands in the current fossil build.
Each listed command is a link to a web page, displaying the detailed
command line help for the appropriate command.
There are links to individual wiki pages for each command. These pages
are named cmd_COMMAND-NAME. These pages are not
defined for all commands - it's a work in progress. Existing pages give
more detailed description of the corresponding command.
Caveats
This reference is complete concerning the list of commands
and the detailed command line reference. It's always in sync with the
used fossil build, because it uses the original command help, which is
compiled into the binary.
Additional, in-depth information in the wiki part is not available for
all commands.
There are several bits of fossil that are not addressed
in the help for commands (special wiki directories, special users, etc.)
so they are (currently) not addressed here. Clarity and brevity may be
sacrificed for expediency at the authors indiscretion. All spelling and
grammatical mistakes are somebody elses fault. void *
prohibited where __C_PLUS_PLUS__ . Title and taxes extra.
Not valid in Hooptigonia.
Testing fossil
There are several test commands to test the
internals of fossil. These commands are listed on a special web page
help?cmd=test. This page is the counter part of
fossil test-commands.