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E Troubleshooting

If you are having trouble with CVS, this appendix may help. If there is a particular error message which you are seeing, then you can look up the message alphabetically. If not, you can look through the section on other problems to see if your problem is mentioned there.

E.1 Partial list of error messages

Here is a partial list of error messages that you may see from CVS. It is not a complete list---CVS is capable of printing many, many error messages, often with parts of them supplied by the operating system, but the intention is to list the common and/or potentially confusing error messages.

The messages are alphabetical, but introductory text such as `cvs update: ' is not considered in ordering them.

In some cases the list includes messages printed by old versions of CVS (partly because users may not be sure which version of CVS they are using at any particular moment).

cannot change permissions on temporary directory
Operation not permitted
This message has been happening in a non-reproducible, occasional way when we run the client/server testsuite, both on Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 and 4.1. We haven't been able to figure out what causes it, nor is it known whether it is specific to linux (or even to this particular machine!). If the problem does occur on other unices, `Operation not permitted' would be likely to read `Not owner' or whatever the system in question uses for the unix EPERM error. If you have any information to add, please let us know as described in section BUGS. If you experience this error while using CVS, retrying the operation which produced it should work fine.
cannot open CVS/Entries for reading: No such file or directory
This generally indicates a CVS internal error, and can be handled as with other CVS bugs (see section BUGS). Usually there is a workaround--the exact nature of which would depend on the situation but which hopefully could be figured out.
cvs [checkout aborted]: cannot rename file file to CVS/,,file: Invalid argument
This message has been reported as intermittently happening with CVS 1.9 on Solaris 2.5. The cause is unknown; if you know more about what causes it, let us know as described in section BUGS.
cvs [update aborted]: could not patch file: No such file or directory
This means that there was a problem finding the patch program. Make sure that it is in your PATH. Note that despite appearances the message is not referring to whether it can find file.
cvs update: could not patch file; will refetch
This means that for whatever reason the client was unable to apply a patch that the server sent. The message is nothing to be concerned about, because inability to apply the patch only slows things down and has no effect on what CVS does.
dying gasps from server unexpected
This message seems to be caused by a hard-to-track-down bug in CVS or the systems it runs on (we don't know--we haven't tracked it down yet!). If you see it, you probably can just retry the operation which failed, or if you have discovered information concerning its cause, please let us know as described in section BUGS.
end of file from server (consult above messages if any)
The most common cause for this message is if you are using an external rsh program and it exited with an error. In this case the rsh program should have printed a message, which will appear before the above message. For more information on setting up a CVS client and server, see section 3.9 Remote repositories.
cvs commit: Executing 'mkmodules'
This means that your repository is set up for a version of CVS prior to CVS 1.8. When using CVS 1.8 or later, the above message will be preceded by
cvs commit: Rebuilding administrative file database
If you see both messages, the database is being rebuilt twice, which is unnecessary but harmless. If you wish to avoid the duplication, and you have no versions of CVS 1.7 or earlier in use, remove -i mkmodules every place it appears in your modules file. For more information on the modules file, see section C.1 The modules file.
rcs error: Unknown option: -x,v/
This message will be followed by a usage message for RCS. It means that you have an old version of RCS (probably supplied with your operating system). CVS only works with RCS version 5 and later.
cvs [server aborted]: received broken pipe signal
This message seems to be caused by a hard-to-track-down bug in CVS or the systems it runs on (we don't know--we haven't tracked it down yet!). It seems to happen only after a CVS command has completed, and you should be able to just ignore the message. However, if you have discovered information concerning its cause, please let us know as described in section BUGS.
cvs commit: Up-to-date check failed for `file'
This means that someone else has committed a change to that file since the last time that you did a cvs update. So before proceeding with your cvs commit you need to cvs update. CVS will merge the changes that you made and the changes that the other person made. If it does not detect any conflicts it will report `M cacErrCodes.h' and you are ready to cvs commit. If it detects conflicts it will print a message saying so, will report `C cacErrCodes.h', and you need to manually resolve the conflict. For more details on this process see section 5.3 Conflicts example.
Usage: diff3 [-exEX3 [-i | -m] [-L label1 -L label3]] file1 file2 file3
Only one of [exEX3] allowed
This indicates a problem with the installation of diff3 and rcsmerge. Specifically rcsmerge was compiled to look for GNU diff3, but it is finding unix diff3 instead. The exact text of the message will vary depending on the system. The solution is to make sure rcsmerge finds GNU diff3. Depending on how rcsmerge was compiled, it might be sufficient to place GNU diff3 in your PATH, or it might be necessary to recompile rcsmerge or find a binary distribution of rcsmerge which looks in the PATH.
cvs commit: warning: editor session failed
This means that the editor which CVS is using exits with a nonzero exit status. Some versions of vi will do this even when there was not a problem editing the file. If so, point the CVSEDITOR environment variable to a small script such as:
#!/bin/sh
vi $*
exit 0

E.2 Other common problems

Here is a list of problems which cannot be readily looked up based on an error message. They are in no particular order.


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