How to delete a view tag with special characters in ClearCase

Question

I have a view, for some reason, it was named with a special character: "0x7f", at least I think so..
For example:

MyView123456   -> MyView'0x7f'123456

I can only found this view by

ct lsview #list all views.

And I found this "0x7f" when dump the outputs to a file.
And using vim.

Now I'm trying to delete this view totally.
I can unregistered and delete the view itself by -uuid. But I cannot delete the view tag.
And I also found wildcard '*' seems not working.

Does anyone know how to delete this view tag?
P.s. I'm under Linux, and no GUI.

Answer 1

Try first if dome of the workaround described in "Removing ClearCase objects whose name begins with a hyphen", when using cleartool rmtag:

 cleartool rmtag -- MyView*

Note the use of '--' in order to separate the command from its parameters

The wildcard being expanded by your shell, try and use it instead in the cleartool interractive session:

cleartool
> rmtag -- MyView*

In Linux shell, see if a single quote is enough:

cleartool rmtag -- MyView'0x7f'123456
# or
cleartool rmtag -- 'MyView0x7f123456'

Answer 2

I was able to create and remove a view with binary data in the tag using Perl. You have to use the OCTAL value of 177 in the strings.

I created my view using this command line:

perl -e '`cleartool mkview -tag myview\177tag /net/bullwinkle/export/vobstg/binarytag.vws`'

And I successfully removed that view tag using this command line:

perl -e '`cleartool rmview -tag myview\177tag`'

If the view was unique enough, you could also use (on Unix) or at least try:

cleartool rmview -tag `cleartool lsview 'myview*123456'`

There is another mechanism, if all else fails: you can edit the vob_tag registry file. This would require an outage as the registry file is loaded into the registry server's memory on clearcase startup and only re/written after that point.

The process is:

1. Stop ClearCase on the registry server
2. CD to /var/adm/rational/clearcase/rgy (Unix) or {CC Install dir}\var\rgy (Windows)
3. Back up the vob_tag file.
4. load the vob_tag file in an editor. (vi/gedit on unix, but I'd use notepad++ on windows)
5. locate the problem view tag (you may need to search on the global path or some other component of the name).
6. Make note of the path to the view.
7. Delete the line.
8. Start ClearCase on the registry server
9. unregister the view or retag it with an easier-to-access tag.