haxpor / p4u

Fill the gap of what missing in p4.

p4u p4 utility (p4u) to fill up the gap of p4 itself.

It is based on bash script thus working with bunch of shell commands. It works on top of p4 binary as released officially but filled the gap for features and things that could be better.

For someone coming from git to use perforce via its cli 'p4', I bet you know what was missing in the latter.

Installation

You can just clone this repository, then symblink p4u file into your executable path e.g. /usr/local/bin/, or you can copy the file there.

To make a symlink from p4u to /usr/local/bin/p4u, you can execute the following command

ln -s `pwd`/p4u /usr/local/bin/p4u

assume that you are currently at the project directory, and you have permission to create a file at target directory. Otherwise, you might need sudo.

Configuration

Configuration is configured through environment variables for now, until there would be much more settings to be made, we might change the way to do this.

Set the following environment variables through your aliased or profile file e.g. ~/.bash_aliases or ~/.bash_profile; for example export <CFG-NAME>=<CFG-VALUE>

• P4U_BIN - to change which p4 binary to use inside the script

  It is a high chance that you would be working on WSL 1/2 with perforce. The project should be able to built on Windows platform, and able to interact with command line on WSL. p4 binary for WSL won't work as it cannot adapt to use the correct path for each platform correctly. So using p4.exe which is a binary for Windows version, but we execute it on WSL is the solution as it understands Windows path correctly. Thus it becomes this setting. Most likely, just set P4U_BIN=p4.exe should be fine for WSL environment.

Features

p4u describe

Original p4 describe has limitation as follows

• It doesn't show (additional) diff of newly added files on the shelved changelist.
• It outputs in non-unified (non-git compatible) format, it needs a particular flags to make it output just that
• It outputs excessed header text although it's good, but sometimes we want to directly pipe it to ... | view - (vim) to see as diff format immediatley without manual removal of such header lines.

Usages as implemented

• p4u describe -S=123456
• p4u describe -S=123456 --no-header

License MIT, Wasin Thonkaew