# Force RCS from the command line to check in the next minor revision.



## Leo Simon (Nov 26, 2019)

From this thread, many seem to think that RCS is outdated, e.g., dominated by git, etc.       I'm a luddite and value its simplicity.
So please don't suggest that I switch to another control system.

The question is:   if my locked revision is of the form a.b.c.d, is there a way to force from the command line that the next revision is a.b+1?        E.g.,  I have a file with lock 3.29.1.5 and I'd like my automated bash script to force the next revision to be 3.30.

Obviously, I could parse the output of rlog -r, but that's very clumsy and inefficient.

Thanks for any help


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## trev (Nov 27, 2019)

It used to be that every system I used had RCS installed whether it was FreeBSD or Solaris, but then it disappeared from FreeBSD (yes, I've reinstalled it from ports). Simple and just works, so I've never needed to change.

To your question:


```
$ ci -r2.3 -f file
RCS/file,v  <--  file
new revision: 2.30; previous revision: 1.1
enter log message, terminated with single '.' or end of file:
>>
```

That will let you force a new revision number of your choosing.


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## SirDice (Nov 27, 2019)

trev said:


> but then it disappeared from FreeBSD


It was removed in 12. As far as I can find the reason for the removal was that it's GPL'd and the newer versions switched to GPLv3 which prevented it from being updated.

I can't tell you how many times I made a typo and ended up doing `ci somefile` instead of `vi somefile`


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