Organization And Conventions

This section is organized alphabetically to make it easy for you to look up a particular command or option. The following conventions are used:

• Arguments to commands and options are in all-capitalized letters in the synopsis that begins each explanation. (Note: in the treeware version of the book, meta-arguments are italicized as well as capitalized; due to the limitations of standard terminal fonts, I have omitted the italicization here.)
• Optional items appear between square brackets: [ ]. (This works out okay because square brackets turn out not used in CVS syntaces.)
• If you must choose one from a set, the choices are separated by bars, like this: x|y|z. (And therefore forward slashes (/) should be interpreted literally – they do not divide choices in a set.)
• Plurals or ellipses indicate multiples, usually separated by whitespace. For example, FILES means one or more files, but [FILES] means zero or more files. The entry [&MOD...] means an ampersand followed immediately by a module name, then whitespace, then maybe another ampersand-module, and so on, zero or more times. (The ellipsis is used because a plural would have left it unclear whether the ampersand is needed only the first time or once for each module.)

  When a plural is parenthesized, as in FILE(S), it means that although technically there can be two or more files, usually there is only one.

• REV is often used to stand for a revision argument. This is usually either a revision number or a tag name. There are very few places in CVS where you can use one but not the other, and those places are noted in the text.