Perforce tip - Find all un-added files

02 Jun 2009 · #asides

When using Perforce, there’s no easy way to determine which files are new and need to be marked for addition to the repository. In subversion and others, this is a simple matter of running svn status in your checkout directory. Sadly, Perforce lacks this simple feature. The P4Win client includes a ‘Local Files Not In Depot’ view but that involves navigating through and opening every single folder to determine if there’s a new file within. Quite tedious, to say the least.

I’ve found this command, run from your client checkout directory, to be a workable alternative:

 C:\...> dir /s /b /A-D | p4 -x - have > nul

If you have a suitable grep.exe on your path, then you can filter out un-wanted files like this:

 C:\...> dir /s /b /A-D | grep -v class$ | p4 -x - have > nul

On Linux, replace dir with find to get something like:

$ find . -type f | grep -v class$ | p4 -x - have > /dev/null