In Perforce on Unix, how do you add a directory that is a symbolic link?

Question

I have created a symbolic link directory in Unix and I would like to add it to perforce.

(this question relates to symlinks on Unix. Windows symbolic links can have very different behaviour from Unix.)

../blah/dir1 is the source directory, which contains files that are already in Perforce
dir2 is the symlink to the source directory that I want to check in

ln -s ../blah/dir1 dir2

If I right-click on "dir2" in the p4v GUI, it will add every file under ../blah/dir1 as a new file (even if these files are already in Perforce) and fubar everything.

If I do a "p4 add dir2" from the command line, it will add every file under ../blah/dir1 as a new file (even if these files are already in Perforce) and fubar everything.

What is the correct syntax?

engtech, make that an answer not a comment. :) – JasonMArcher Feb 07 '11 at 22:10 — JasonMArcher, Feb 07 '11 at 22:10
thanks, I didn't see that option. – engtech Feb 09 '11 at 19:03 — engtech, Feb 09 '11 at 19:03

score 31 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 09 '11 at 19:03

31

Add the symbolic link from the shell using the -t option to set the symlink type.

p4 add -t symlink dir2

answered Feb 09 '11 at 19:03

engtech

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I find I need to use -f : p4 add -f -t symlink dir2 – kdubs May 01 '23 at 16:12

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered May 01 '14 at 07:18

4

Perforce is able to detect symlinks itself and no special options need to be added in the command. Just regular command like following suffices the need

p4 add <sym link filename>

answered May 01 '14 at 07:18

Varun Bhatia

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Actually, no. I got `Null directory (//) not allowed in ...` w/o `-t symlink`, while it worked fine with it. – ddevienne Dec 03 '22 at 14:26

In Perforce on Unix, how do you add a directory that is a symbolic link?

2 Answers2

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