How do I revert a big change in CVS?

Question

One of my colleagues has totally messed up the contents of a directory in our main CVS repository. I need to just revert the whole module to the state it was in at the end of l

Answer 1

I'm still interested to know if there's an easier way. (There must surely be an easier way). What I ended up doing was, on a Linux PC using bash:

# Get woking copy we're going to change
cd ~/work
rm -rf modulename
cvs up -dP modulename
cd modulename

# Remove all files
find . -name CVS -prune -o -type f -print | xargs cvs rm -f

# Get the old revision
cd ~
mkdir scratch
cd scratch
cvs -q co -D 2008-12-31 modulename
cd modulename

# Copy everything to the working dir and do "cvs add" on it
find . -name CVS -prune -o -type f -print | \
    xargs tar c | \
    (cd ~/work/modulename && tar xv | \
    xargs cvs add)

# Check everything is OK before we commit
cd ~/work/modulename
cvs -nq up

# it gave me an error on readme.txt because I'd deleted and then added it, so:
mv readme.txt x # save good rev
cvs add readme.txt # resurrect the bad rev
mv x readme.txt # clobber file with good rev

# Commit it
cvs commit -m "Revert all changes this year"

# Delete now-empty directories
cvs -q up -dP

# Double-check everything is back how it was
diff -ur -xCVS ~/scratch/modulename ~/work/modulename

Then I discovered that there were still differences - my colleague had added filenames containing spaces, which weren't deleted by the above process. I had to delete those separately. (I should have used find ... -print0 rather than -print, and passed the -0 argument to xargs. I just didn't realise there were files with spaces.)