2.4 The administrative files

The directory ‘$CVSROOT/CVSROOT’ contains some administrative files. See section Reference manual for Administrative files, for a complete description. You can use CVS without any of these files, but some commands work better when at least the ‘modules’ file is properly set up.

The most important of these files is the ‘modules’ file. It defines all modules in the repository. This is a sample ‘modules’ file.

CVSROOT         CVSROOT
modules         CVSROOT modules
cvs             gnu/cvs
rcs             gnu/rcs
diff            gnu/diff
tc              yoyodyne/tc

The ‘modules’ file is line oriented. In its simplest form each line contains the name of the module, whitespace, and the directory where the module resides. The directory is a path relative to $CVSROOT. The last four lines in the example above are examples of such lines.

The line that defines the module called ‘modules’ uses features that are not explained here. See section The modules file, for a full explanation of all the available features.