When using CVS-over-SSH, set the CVSROOT environment variable as follows:
:ext:username@remotemachine:/full/path/to/cvsroot
You may wish to use SSH public key authentication and ssh-agent to avoid having to enter your password on the remote machine repeatedly.
To generate a patch against CVS to your current sandbox:
cvs diff -uw
To generate a patch against a tagged revision (PROD_2005031101 for this example) in CVS to your current sandbox:
cvs diff -uw -r PROD_2005031101
To apply a symbolic CVS tag to all files in your sandbox, do the following:
cvs tag PROD_2005050900
where PROD_2005050900 is the name of the symbolic tag you want to apply.
Use the -kb flag:
cvs add -kb getacro.gif
See Version Management with CVS for more.
To export from CVS, resulting in a directory structure with no “CVS” subdirectories, use the cvs export command:
cvs export -r PROD_2005100501 webproject
PROD_2005100501 is the tag (a datespec following -D can also be used); webproject is the source tree to export.