Recovering files from archive of CVS *,v files

Question

I trying to recover some old source code (plain text) from a bunch of files that used to be managed with CVS. I have a directory containing all of the source code files in C

Answer 1

Depending on your platform, you might find rcs to work well, as long as you're looking at only a few files at a time. On many Unix/Linux systems, if my memory serves, you could use the co (checkout) command straight from the command line.

Or you could take advantage of the fact that CVS and rcs store the latest version of the file on head near the top of the file, and any other revisions are created by applying diffs internally. Therefore, you can probably strip out the latest version easily using a text editor, and possibly automate it with a perl script. This trick won't work for any other version.

These are options in case there's problems with quick installing a CVS server (if one isn't already installed; they tend to come with Unix-like systems) and checking out.