In Perforce on Unix, how do you add a directory that is a symbolic link?

Question

I have created a symbolic link directory in Unix and I would like to add it to perforce.

(this question relates to symlinks on Unix. Windows symbolic links can have very different behaviour from Unix.)

• ../blah/dir1 is the source directory, which contains files that are already in Perforce
• dir2 is the symlink to the source directory that I want to check in

ln -s ../blah/dir1 dir2

If I right-click on "dir2" in the p4v GUI, it will add every file under ../blah/dir1 as a new file (even if these files are already in Perforce) and fubar everything.

If I do a "p4 add dir2" from the command line, it will add every file under ../blah/dir1 as a new file (even if these files are already in Perforce) and fubar everything.

What is the correct syntax?

Answer 1

Add the symbolic link from the shell using the -t option to set the symlink type.

p4 add -t symlink dir2

Answer 2

Perforce is able to detect symlinks itself and no special options need to be added in the command. Just regular command like following suffices the need

p4 add <sym link filename>