Determining the last changelist synced to in Perforce

Question

A question that occasionally arises is what is the best way to determine the changelist that you last synced to in Perforce. This is often needed for things like injecting the c

Answer 1

I recommend the opposite for automatic build systems: you should first get the latest changelist from the server using:

p4 changes -s submitted -m1

then sync to that change and record it in the revision info. The reason is as follows. Although Perforce recommends the following to determine the changelist to which the workspace is synced:

p4 changes -m1 @clientname

they note a few gotchas:

• This only works if you have not submitted anything from the workspace in question.
• It is also possible that a client workspace is not synced to any specific changelist.

and there's an additional gotcha they don't mention:

• If the highest changelist to which the sync occured strictly deleted files from the workspace, the next-highest changelist will be reported (unless it, too, strictly deleted files).

If you must sync first and record later, Perforce recommends running the following command to determine if you've been bit by the above gotchas; it should indicate nothing was synced or removed:

p4 sync -n @changelist_number

Answer 2

You could also use the cstat command:

p4 help cstat

cstat -- Dump change/sync status for current client

p4 cstat [files...]

Lists changes that are needed, had or partially synced in the current
client. The output is returned in tagged format, similar to the fstat
command.

The fields that cstat displays are:

    change   changelist number
    status   'have', 'need' or 'partial'

Answer 3

The best I've found so far is to do your sync to whatever changelist you want to build and then use changes -m1 //...#have to get the current local changelist (revision).

p4 sync @CHANGELIST_NUM p4 changes -m1 //...#have | awk '{print $2}'

Gives you the changelist number that you can the use wherever you want. I am currently looking for a simpler way than p4 changes -m1 //...#have.

Answer 4

If you are using P4V you can do this graphically:

• In the Dashboard tab (View->Dashboard) choose a folder and you will see a list of changelists that the folder isn't yet updated with. Note the lowest number (in the highest row).
• Make sure that in the Workspace Tree you have selected the same folder as previously in the Dashboard. Then go to the History tab (View->History) and scroll down to the number noted previously. The number just below that number is the number of your current changelist.

Answer 5

For the whole depot (not just your workspace/client)

p4 counter change

does the job, just telling the last changelist.

Answer 6

Just to answer this myself in keeping with Jeff's suggestion of using Stackoverflow as a place to keep technical snippets....

From the command line use:

p4 changes -m1 @<clientname>

And just replace with the name of your client spec. This will produce output of the form:

Change 12345 on 2008/08/21 by joebloggs@mainline-client '....top line of description...'

Which is easily parsed to extract the changelist number.