9 Changes, Descriptions, and History

Changes to the Perforce depot can be listed via the p4 changes command. This will provide a brief description of each change, who made the change, and what its change number was. A change can be examined in detail via the p4 describe changenumber command. This will provide the submit log and the diffs of the actual change.

Commonly, the p4 describe command is used in one of three ways:

p4 describe -s CHANGE

List a short description of changeset CHANGE, including the commit log of the particular changeset and a list of the files it affected.

p4 describe -du CHANGE

List a description of changeset CHANGE, including the commit log of the particular changeset, a list of the files it affected and a patch for each modified file, in a format similar to “unified diff” patches (but not exactly the same).

p4 describe -dc CHANGE

List a description of changeset CHANGE, including the commit log of the particular changeset, a list of the files it affected and a patch for each modified file, in a format similar to “context diff” patches (but not exactly the same).

The p4 filelog filename command will show the history of a file, including all submits, integrations, and branches of it.