Perforce CLI hangs indefinitely

Surprizing little documentation on setting this up, so I'm sure this is a setup problem.

Steps to reproduce: Open terminal (p4.exe in PATH) type p4 [RET]

Hangs indefinitely. When I issue commands from emacs (ie p4 edit [file] it eventually comes back with

Perforce client error:
 Connect to server failed; check $P4PORT.
 TCP connect 开发者_StackOverflow中文版to perforce failed.
 perforce: host unknown.

The error message that is displayed when called from emacs points in the right direction, p4 can't find your perforce server (the default is perforce, that's where the perforce: host unknown comes from.

Make sure to either specify -p for your call to p4 or set the environment variable P4PORT. Beware, despite the name, P4PORT includes the hostname of the perforce server.

p4 -p serverhost:1666

I'm not sure why p4 would hang indefinitely on the CLI and return after some time when called from emacs.

In my case I set these variables in order to get it to work (very annoying it just hangs instead of complaining of the missing configuration).

P4PORT P4USER P4CONFIG P4EDITOR

Please check if a p4 process running in background in the same shell. you need to stop already running process.