Recursive add all files in a directory with Perforce

Patrick — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 07:14:26 +0000

It is very common to want to add a directory of files to your source control system. With Perforce the command line client doesn’t support this natively. I would think that a command like this would work: “p4 add …”. But unfortunately Perforce displays this non-useful message when you try that:

Can’t add filenames with wildcards [@#%*] in them.
Use -f option to force add.

Instead you have to use a one line shell command to do this. On Windows try this:

“dir /b /s /a-d | p4 -x – add”

For non-Windows platforms you’ll have to do a similar command. Just change the ‘dir’ part to whatever you use to display files in your OS.

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Recursive add all files in a directory with Perforce