How to restore a deleted and committed directory in CVS

I had to put my CVS administrator hat on this morning when a colleague realised that yesterday he had managed to delete and commit a directory full of files by accident. We needed to roll-back the clock to yesterday afternoon so to speak but CVS doesn't really give you any handy tools to do this.

I first logged onto the CVS server and browsed to the relevant directory (on the server the directory and files are not deleted, just marked as so) and took a look inside one of the ,v text files to find the time when the commit happened (where the file's state changed from Exp to dead).

After a bit of searching I found a very clear set of instructions on the Ximbiot CVS Wiki that detailed how to restore a deleted directory.

I followed those instructions and brought the directory (and files) back to life again!

Technorati Tags: CVS, Andrew Beacock