How to use CVS on Unix

I'm quite pretty new to the concept of CVS. However, I want to start using CVS and thus need to 'check-in' some scripts. I'm using a UNIX server and I know that CVS is installed, since doing a

cv开发者_StackOverflow中文版s -v

Gives me the correct version number installed. Now the problem I have in is finding documentation to use CVS. Is there an online tutorial/FAQ someone can recommend. I've scoured Google for information and all I come across are posts for installing CVS ...

What I'm really looking for our sample commands taking a beginner from scratch like Logging in etc.

The meta-answer to your question is not to use CVS, unless you're participating in a project that's already using it. Even the CVS maintainers, as far as I understand, don't recommend it for new projects, but recommend svn instead. If you're being obliged to use it, then this answer isn't helpful; sorry.

If the decision is up to you, then you have alternatives:

• svn is the system which is most similar to CVS (as noted in another answer).
• Mercurial is a distributed version control system, but the distributed features aren't hugely important if, as your question vaguely suggests, you're working on your own.
• Git has broadly the same model as Mercurial.
• There are others (including at least bazaar and darcs), but those are the big three.

All of these are heavily used in both small projects and big ones.

I now tend to recommend Mercurial to people, and that's the one I predominantly use myself. There are holy wars possible about this, but I feel that's the one which has the best tradeoff between flexibility, good design, and usability (there's a longer version of this answer...!)

Update: there's a very good Mercurial introduction by Spolsky, which is well worth reading for rationale and pointers.

Use svn instead, lots of documentation for that.

Hmmm... a quick Google search for cvs tutorial returns this as the second hit:

• http://www.linux.ie/articles/tutorials/cvs.php

I've quickly glanced over it, and Chapter 3 (Basic CVS Usage) starts with "Logging In" and seems to come pretty close to what you need. If you have any concrete questions, feel free to ask.