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p4 jobs

List jobs known to the Perforce versioning service.

Syntax

p4 [g-opts] jobs [-e jobview] [-i -l -r] [-m max] [file[rev] ...]
p4 jobs -R

Description

When called without any arguments, p4 jobs lists all jobs stored in Perforce. You can limit the output of the command by specifying various criteria with options and arguments. If you specify a file pattern, the jobs listed will be limited to those linked to changelists affecting particular files. The -e option can be used to further limit the listed jobs to jobs containing certain words.

Jobs are listed in alphanumeric order (or, if you use the -r option, in reverse alphanumeric order) by name, one job per line. The format of each line is:

jobname on date by user *status* description

The description is limited to the first 31 characters, unless the -l (long) option is used.

If any of the date, user, status, or description fields have been removed by the Perforce superuser with p4 jobspec, the corresponding value will be missing from each job’s output.

To limit the list of jobs to those that have been fixed by changelists that affected particular files, use p4 jobs filespec. The files or file patterns provided can contain revision specifiers or a revision range.

Options

Usage Notes

Job Views

Use p4 jobs -e jobview to limit the list of jobs to those that contain particular words. You can specify that the search terms be matched only in particular fields, or anywhere in the text of the job. You can use job views to match jobs by values in date fields, though there are fewer options for dates than there are for text. Job fields of type bulk are not indexed for searching.

Text matching is case-insensitive. All alphanumeric strings (including words including embedded punctuation) separated by whitespace are indexed as words.

The job view 'word1word2 ... wordN' can be used to find jobs that contain all of word1 through wordN in any of the job’s fields.

Spaces between search terms in job views act as boolean AND operations. To find jobs that contain any of the terms (boolean OR), separate the terms with the “|” character.

Ampersands (&) can be used as boolean ANDs as well; the boolean operators bind in the order &, |, space (highest precedence to lowest precedence). Use parentheses to change the grouping order.

Search results can be narrowed by matching values within specific fields with the job view syntax "fieldname=value". The value must be a single token, including both alphanumeric characters and punctuation.

The wildcard "*" allows for partial word matches. The job view "fieldname=string*" matches "string", "stringy", "stringlike", and so on.

Date fields can be matched by expressing the job view date as yyyy/mm/dd or yyyy/mm/dd:hh:mm:ss. If a specific time is not provided, the equality operator (=) matches the entire day.

The usual comparison operators (=, >, <, >=, and <=) are available.

Additionally, you can use the NOT operator (^) to negate the sense of some comparisons. (See Limitations below for details).

Regular expression matching is supported by the regular expression matching operator (~=).

To search for words containing characters that are job search expression operators, escape the characters with a backslash (\) character. To match the backslash character, escape it with an additional backlash (\\).

The behavior of these operators depends on the type of job field you’re comparing against:

If you’re not sure of a field’s type, run p4 jobspec -o, which outputs the job specification used at your site. The p4 jobspec field called Fields: contains the job fields' names and datatypes. See p4 jobspec for a discussion of the different field types.

Other Usage Notes

• The p4 user form has a JobView: field that allows a job view to be linked to a particular user. After a user enters a job view into this field, any changelists he creates automatically list jobs that match the job view in this field. The jobs that are fixed by the changelist can be left in the form, and the jobs that are not should be deleted.
• p4 jobs sorts its output alphanumerically by job name, which also happens to be the chronological order in which the jobs were entered. If you use job names other than the standard Perforce names, this ordering may not help much.
• The -m max-r construct displays the last max jobs in alphanumeric order, not the max most recent jobs, but if you’re using Perforce’s default job naming scheme (jobs numbered like job001394), alphanumeric job order is identical to order by entry date.
• You can use the * wildcard to determine if a text field contains a value or not by checking for the job view "field=*"; any non-null value for field matches.
• When querying for jobs using the -e jobview option, be aware of your operating system and command shell’s behavior for parsing, quoting, and escaping special characters, particularly when using wildcards, logical operators, and parentheses.

Limitations

• Job views cannot be used to search for jobs containing null-valued fields. In other words, if a field has been deleted from an existing job, then the field is not indexed, and there is no job view that matches this "deleted field" value.
• The job view NOT operator (^) can be used only after an AND within the job view. Thus, the job views "gui ^name=joe" and "gui&^name=joe" are valid, while the job views "gui|^name=joe" and "^name=joe" are not.

• The * wildcard is a useful way of getting around both of these limitations.

  For instance, to obtain all jobs without the string "unwanted", query for 'job=* ^unwanted". All jobs will be selected by the first portion of the job view and logically ANDed with all jobs NOT containing the string "unwanted".

  Likewise, because the job view "field=*" matches any non-null value for field, (and the job field can be assumed not to be null), you can search for jobs with null-valued fields with "job=* ^field=*"

• You cannot currently search on space-delimited fields with conditionals. For example, instead of using p4 jobs -e "field=word1 word2", you must use p4 jobs -e "field=word1 field=word2".

Examples

Related Commands