Displaying annotations (details about changes to file contents)
To find out which file revisions or changelists affected lines in a text
file, issue the p4 annotate command.
By default, p4 annotate displays the file line by
line, with each line preceded by a revision number indicating the
revision that made the change. To display changelist numbers instead of
revision numbers, specify the -c option.
Example Using p4 annotate to display changes to a file
A file is added (file.txt#1) to the depot, containing the
following lines:
This is a text file. The second line has not been changed. The third line has not been changed.
The third line is deleted and the second line edited so that
file.txt#2 reads:
This is a text file. The second line is new.
The output of p4 annotate and p4 annotate
-c look like this:
$ p4 annotate file.txt
//Acme/files/file.txt#3 - edit change 153 (text)
1: This is a text file.
2: The second line is new.
$ p4 annotate -c file.txt
//Acme/files/file.txt#3 - edit change 153 (text)
151: This is a text file.
152: The second line is new.
The first line of file.txt has been present since
revision 1, which was submitted in changelist 151. The second line has
been present since revision 2, which was submitted in changelist
152.
To show all lines (including deleted lines) in the file, use
p4 annotate -a as follows:
$ p4 annotate -a file.txt
//Acme/files/file.txt#3 - edit change 12345 (text)
1-3: This is a text file.
1-1: The second line has not been changed.
1-1: The third line has not been changed.
2-3: The second line is new.
The first line of output shows that the first line of the file has
been present for revisions 1 through 3. The next two lines of output
show lines of file.txt present only in revision 1. The
last line of output shows that the line added in revision 2 is still
present in revision 3.
You can combine the -a and -c options to
display all lines in the file and the changelist numbers (rather than
the revision numbers) at which the lines existed.
