Perforce 2009.1: Command Reference

Global Options

Synopsis

Global options for Perforce commands; these options may be supplied on the command line before any Perforce command.

Syntax

p4 [-cclient -ddir -Hhost -pport -Ppass -uuser -xfile -Ccharset -Qcharset -Llanguage] [-G] [-s] [-z tag] cmd [args ...]
p4 -V
p4 -h

Options

-c client	Overrides any P4CLIENT setting with the specified client name.
-d dir	Overrides any PWD setting (i.e. current working directory) and replaces it with the specified directory.
-G	Causes all output (and batch input for form commands with -i) to be formatted as marshalled Python dictionary objects. This is most often used when scripting.
-H host	Overrides any P4HOST setting and replaces it with the specified hostname.
-p port	Overrides any P4PORT setting with the specified port number.
-P pass	Overrides any P4PASSWD setting with the specified password.
-s	Prepends a descriptive field (for example, text:, info:, error:, exit:) to each line of output produced by a Perforce command. This is most often used when scripting.
-u user	Overrides any P4USER, USER, or USERNAME setting with the specified user name.
-x file	Instructs Perforce to read arguments, one per line, from the specified file. If file is a single hyphen (-), then standard input is read.
-C charset	Overrides any P4CHARSET setting with the specified character set.
-Q charset	Overrides any P4COMMANDCHARSET setting with the specified character set.
-L language	This feature is reserved for system integrators.
-z tag	Causes output of many reporting commands to be in the same tagged format as that generated by p4 fstat.
-V	Displays the version of the p4 client program and exits.
-h	Displays basic usage information and exits.

Usage Notes

•

Be aware that the global options must be specified on the command line before the Perforce command. Options specified after the Perforce command will not be interpreted as global options, but as options for the command being invoked. It is therefore possible to have the same command line option appearing twice in the same command, being interpreted differently each time.

For example, the command p4 -c anotherclient edit -c 140 file.c will open file file.c for edit in pending changelist 140 under client workspace anotherclient.

•	The -x option is useful for automating tedious tasks; a user adding several files at once could create a text file with the names of these files and invoke p4 -x textfile add to add them all at once.

The -x option can be extremely powerful - as powerful as whatever generates its input. For example, a UNIX developer wishing to edit any file referring to an included file.h file, for instance, could grep -l file.h *.c | cut -f1 -d: | p4 -x - edit.

In this example, the grep command lists occurrences of file.h in the *.c files, the -l option tells grep to list each file only once, and the cut command splits off the filename from grep's output before passing it to the p4 -x command.

•	The -s option can be useful in automated scripts.

For example, a script could be written as part of an in-house build process which executes p4 -s commands, discards any output lines beginning with "info:", and alerts the user if any output lines begin with "error:".

•	Python developers will find the -G option extremely useful for scripting. For instance, to get a dictionary of all fields of a job whose ID is known, use the following:

job_dict = marshal.load(os.popen('p4 -G job -o ' + job_id, 'rb'))

In some cases, it may not be intuitively obvious what keys the client program uses. If you pipe the output of any p4 -G invocation to the following script, you will see every record printed out in key/value pairs:

 

#!/usr/local/bin/python import marshal, sys try:     num=0     while 1:         num=num+1         print '\n--%d--' % num         dict =  marshal.load(sys.stdin, 'rb')         for key in dict.keys(): print "%s: %s" % (key,dict[key]) except EOFError: pass

Python developers on Windows should be aware of potential CR/LF translation issues; in the example, it is necessary to call marshal.load() to read the data in binary ("rb") mode.

•	Some uses of the global options are absurd.

For example, p4 -c anotherclient help provides exactly the same output as p4 help.

Examples

p4 -p new_server:1234 sync	Performs a sync using server new_server and port 1234, regardless of the settings of the P4PORT environment variable or registry setting.
p4 -c new_client submit -c 100	The first -c is the global option to specify the client name. The second -c specifies a changelist number.
p4 -s -x filelist.txt edit	If filelist.txt contains a list of files, this command opens each file on the list for editing, and produces output suitable for parsing by scripts. Any errors as a result of the automated p4 edit commands (for example, a file in filelist.txt not being found) can then be easily detected by examining the command's output for lines beginning with "error:"