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clearcase

What is a view-private-file and how was it created?

I was playing around with creation and detection of Evil Twins, and when I delivered a change that had a Evil twin I noticed my snapshot-view suddenly had the following file:

viewprivatefile

This file is not in source control, but I'm wondering how it was created and what a view-private file is ?

The content of the file is:

cleartool : cleartool: Error: Unable to access ".@@\main\0/element-pname": No such file or directory. In Zeile:1 Zeichen:1 cleartool find . -directory -ver '!lbtype(NOTDEFINED)' -exec "clearto ...

CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (cleartool: Erro...e or directory.:String) [], RemoteException
FullyQualifiedErrorId : NativeCommandError

So I guess it was created when I tried to find evil twins but had an error in my command. I'm just interested why ClearCase created this file in my view, instead of maybe logging the error or something similar ?

Has anyone ever noticed this behavior ?

Solution

  • A private file (in snapshot or dynamic view) is a file which is not tracked/versioned by ClearCase.
    See here or here to find/list them.

    In your case, it could have been created because of your script making a redirection error ( > null instead of > /dev/null). Only the latter would make sure stdout is not displayed (because redirected to /dev/null.
    Same for Windows, where >NULL prevents any stdout to be displayed, as opposed to >null, which would create a file named 'null'