Sometimes, you don't realize how simple *nix is until someone beats you over the head with it.

Case in point: RCS (Revision Control System). Chances are, you have it installed already in your *nix, *BSD distribution of choice.

Why use it?
so you don't have to do a save as and make cryptic backups (with weird extensions) of oft-edited files (like httpd.conf or webgui.conf or yourNewMacro.pm)

Why not cvs or svn or ...?
You can do that, but maybe you just want to make progressive edits and don't really care a lot about all the extra fancy features. You just want to backup, edit, and have a chance to review versions of one file, but not interested so much in application deployment.

How do I do it?
(optional, but recommended: create an RCS folder in the directory you're editing -- RCS info will go there)
ci -l filetoedit.ext
(give it an optional tag and use . on its own line to stop tag)

edit away.

How do I recover?
co -l filetorecover.ext

How do I see what I've done before?
rlog file.ext

How do I get diffs?
rcsdiff file.ext

This information is provided in the man pages, but I got an excellent quick look at this tutorial.

Windows users don't have to be left out. http://www.codeproject.com/tools/cs-rcs.asp is one option for you.

If you know and use cvs or svn, you may question my point. cvs and svn, especially, are great for projects that span multiple files and directories. RCS is great to simply be able to control one file at a time. To each his own, to be sure. I hope this might be of benefit to someone.

A suggestion ... you might want to alias cvi, forinstance, to "ci -l $1; vi $1" as a matter of convenience (?).
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