sccs2rcs(1) Manual Page

sccs2rcs [-c commentfile] [-l logfile]

sccs2rcs is a script to convert an existing SCCS history into an RCS history without losing any of the information that fits RCS’s ontology. It requires that the SCCS and RCS tools be installed on your system. It will cope gracefully with the BSD/GNU CSSC front end.

Run this in a directory with an SCCS subdirectory. It will convert all the SCCS files to corresponding RCS master files in a new RCS directory; the SCCS data itself is accessed read-only. It will complain and terminate if any of the SCCS files are checked out or if the RCS directory already exists and is nonempty. If the directory contains snapshot auxiliary data produced by Emacs VC mode to simulate RCS/CVS-style tags, that will be used too.

Date, time, author, comments, and branches, are all preserved. Most SCCS keywords are translated to RCS keywords; it will complain about the exceptions so you can see them. Keyboard expansion is suppressed during conversion. The MR field of SCCS commits is discarded.

If this tool fails it will tell you why. "rm -rf RCS; unget SCCS/s.*" will recover your initial state.

With -c you can specify an initial-comments file. Each line should consist of a filename followed by a colon, followed by the RCS initial coment to set for that file. This option is deprecated, because later version-control systems don’t have a analog of this feature.

With -l you can make the command log be written to a specified file, whether the program fails or succeeds. This is mainly useful for debugging unusual situations.

If you are thinking of using this as part of a conversion sequence intended to get an SCCS collection to Git or another DVS, chase the references under "See Also"; they might save you work.

reposurgeon(1), cvs-fast-export(1)

Returns 1 on any error, 0 otherwise.

Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>; project page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/sccs2rcs