Problems with CVS: “[tag aborted]: cannot rename file, file exists” Error

/* Posted October 9th, 2008 at 7:27am */
/* Filed under Linux, Programming, Windows */
/* */

CVS and SVN logos

I was happily tagging away my just-released source code on my Cygwin Linux for Windows emulation layer using the good old fashioned Cygwin command prompt with the good old fashioned ‘cvs’ command when my tag aborted suddenly and spit out this error:

cvs [tag aborted]: cannot rename file /my/cvs/repo/,userguide.pdf, to /my/cvs/repo/userguide.pdf,v: File exists

…Much to my horror since it was in the middle of a CVS tag operation. This occurs because of a permissions problem, namely that the file cannot be renamed because you don’t have write permissions for it. This is a peculiar anomaly on Windows only, since I certainly did not have userguide.pdf open anywhere. It turns out that WinCVS, like Cygwin, has this problem as well. It seems to occur because the file doesn’t get closed properly for some reason on Windows. If you’re using WinCVS, try shutting it down and restarting it again. Hopefully it will properly close the file. On Cygwin, there’s not really any way to “restart” anything except your entire OS. To get around this, I simply executed the CVS tag again from a proper Linux terminal. On Linux you won’t get this sort of problem. The tagging operation then resumed seamlessly without any problems, even though it had quit halfway on Windows. Or if you must use Cygwin, restart the OS as I mentioned earlier.