How do I get ClearCase to make an archive of a subdir of snapshot as it was at an earlier revision?

Question

I'm not particularly experienced with ClearCase, so if my terminology is incorrect please let me know.

In Git I can run the command:

git archive -o /tmp/dump.zip $SHA_FROM_THE_PAST path/to/dump

I want to do something similar in ClearCase.

The ClearCase repository contains two branches: main and snapshot_foo.
snapshot_foo branches from main at some point in the past.
What I want is a dump of all the files as they looked at the time the snapshot was first created.

I understand that there is no 'global' state identifier like there is in Git; in AFAIK, in ClearCase each element is versioned individually, so there will not necessarily be a one-to-one equivalent to that command.

I've thought about creating a new snapshot starting at the same point in time from main, and just copying what I need from that, but I am bewildered and confused as to how I would go about it.

Answer 1

The simplest case would be when you have set a label on main just before creating snapshot.

But if you have no such label, you can get all the files at the time just before the creation of the snapshot_foo branch:

• a/ cleartool descr -l brtype:snapshot_foo@/myVob to get the date of creation for this branch
• b/ make a snapshot view with a time-based selection rule similar to this question

    element /myPath/... /main/{!created_since(01-Sep-2008.12:34:56)}
    element /myPath/... /main/LATEST

(with 12h 34 minutes 56 seconds being the time just before the creation of the brtype snapshot_foo)

(see the config_spec man page)

Once the snapshot view is created with the right versions in it, you can zip its content, achieving a similar result to the git archive you mention in your question.