CVS Quick Reference

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http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/mug/hot_topics/mdf/cvs_quickref.html

If you want to see descriptions of all the changes made to a particular file, you can run cvs log file.
To verify that nobody else is editing the file you want to change, run cvs editors.
If you need to make changes to a file, run cvs edit file. This will make the file writeable and let you know if anyone else is already editing the same file. If you decide that you *don't* need to edit a file, make sure to release the file by running cvs unedit file.
Once you've got a writeable file, go ahead and make all necessary changes. Any changes you make will only apply to this instance of the file and can't affect anyone else (unless you later commit them.)
If you want to see exactly what you've changed in a file you've modified, run cvs diff file. To see more of the context in which a change resides, run cvs diff -c file. You can also see the changes between any two versions with cvs diff -rversion1 -rversion2 file.

After you've got everything fixed to your satisfaction and you want to save your changes to the main repository, run cvs commit or cvs commit file, where file is whatever you want to commit.

This will throw you into your favorite editor (where favorite is defined
as whatever the CVSEDITOR environment variable is set to or, if that's
not set, whatever the EDITOR environment variable is set to or, if
THAT'S not set, you'll be forced to use vi.)

Add a *descriptive* comment documenting what changes you have made to
the file. When you are done, exit from the editor and your changes will
be made in the master copy of this file.

If you exit out of the editor without entering anything or without
saving the text you entered, you'll be asked if you want to (a)bort,
(c)ontinue, (e)dit or (!) reuse the message for all remaining
directories in this commit.

Enter a to abort the commit.

To get the most recent version of everything in a directory and all subdirectories, run cvs update, which will produce a report like:

cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: Updating cmd
U cmd/foo.c
M cmd/bar.f
cvs update: Updating libmdf
U libmdf/unix/bletch.f
cvs update: Updating doc
? doc/NOTES-TO-MYSELF

In this report, if the first character is a;

U The file was updated correctly.

P Like U, but the CVS server sends a patch instead of an entire file.  This
  accomplishes the same thing as U using less band- width.

M You've made changes to this file. If you want to save these changes to
the repository, you'll need to run 'cvs commit'

? This file isn't in the CVS repository; if you don't want to add it to
the repository, CVS will print this message every time you do an update,
but will otherwise ignore it.

Not shown above is the dreaded C condition, which means somebody else
committed a new version to the repository while you were changing this
file, and CVS couldn't reconcile your changes with their changes, so
it's put both sets in your copy of the file, between '<<<<<<<',
'------', and '>>>>>>>' marks.

If everybody does a good job of using cvs edit, you *should* never see
this...

If you wanted to abort your local changes and revert to the version on the server, just delete the local file and checkout again. Merely checking out over a modified file won't get it reverted to the version on the server. Or, you can use 'cvs update -C files…'
If you only wanted to update the "cmd" subdirectory of "mdf", you could just run cvs update cmd from the "mdf" directory, or simply cd cmd and cvs update.
If, in the middle of editing a file, you decide you need to start over with a fresh copy of your file, you can remove the file and run cvs update file to get a pristine copy of the original. This command does an implicit cvs unedit on the file. (revoke to last version)

If you'd like to retrieve a specific version of the file for some reason, you can do cvs update -rversion file for a specific revision number.

If you do this, the file will get checked out with a "sticky tag". The
only way to get back the main file from the repository is to do cvs
update -A file, which gets rid of the sticky tag.

To add a new file to the repository, use cvs add file. This will get added to the repository the next time you run cvs commit.