General pattern in CVS commands

When you invoke CVS, you must specify which action you want to perform. The format of a CVS invocation is:

  $ cvs command
  
  For example, you can use 
  
  floss$ cvs update
  floss$ cvs diff
  floss$ cvs commit
  

Both CVS and the command can take options. Options that affect the behavior of CVS, independently of the command being run, are called global options; command-specific options are just called command options. Global options always go to the left of the command; command options, to its right. So in

  $ cvs -Q update -p
  

-Q is a global option, and -p is a command option. (If you're curious, -Q means "quietly"-that is, suppress all diagnostic output, and print error messages only if the command absolutely cannot be completed for some reason; -p means to send the results of update to standard output instead of to files.)

  $ cvs
  

Reading over the output of most of the CVS commands, you'll notice that CVS precedes each filename with a single letter. The use of a single letter on the left to indicate the status of a file is a general pattern in CVS command output. You'll see it in commands such as checkout and update.