Making a tarball of CVS Changes
One of the things I like to do when I've made changes to several files in a CVS directory - and haven't yet checked them in, is to make a tarball (a .tgz file) of them so that I can move them to another machine for testing. For example, working on cross-platform code, it's nice to get it working on one platform and then move it to the next and verify it before checking it in. This way all the changes for the modification are in the one CVS check-in.
I wanted to make a simple alias for TCSH that did this on my Mac. I was doing it all the time and it just seemed smart to finally do this right once and then just use it from here on out. The problem I got into were these "Apple Dot" files (._file) that tar was including in the tarball even though they weren't listed in the list of files to include - nor could I exclude them with the command options.
So I did some googling and found the COPYFILE_DISABLE environment setting in Leopard. If this is set to 'true', then these Apple Dot files will not be copied. But, since I didn't want to make a big change to all my shells, I decided to simply make it defined for the one command.
Finally, then, here is the alias:
alias tcu 'setenv COPYFILE_DISABLE true; tar zcvf \!* `cvs -q update | grep -v \^\? | sed -e "s/^[AM] //g"`; unsetenv COPYFILE_DISABLE'
(it's all one line, of course)