how to remove dangerous stuff from old CVS commits?

Question

Cleaning up after a former employee, I've found that they accidentally included 800MB of data files in a commit to CVS years ago. Several other commits to the same project were made afterwards.

This data is extremely security sensitive and legally restricted and it needs to be removed completely (nothing hanging about in the Attic or filesystem anywhere).

How do I get rid of the files without corrupting CVS?

(It's a linux host, and I have root access and am CLI fluent, but not a CVS expert!)

According to the manuals, that will not remove the files from the history or "attic". They will still be retrievable. I need them totally destroyed. — Medievalist, Oct 28 '19 at 18:24
I understand; I was just curious how far you had gotten in your research or activity. — Jeff Schaller, Oct 28 '19 at 18:35
I'm still in "speed reading the entire doc set" mode. Even though the issue has existed undetected for quite some time, it is worrisome enough that I'm considering cloning the system and doing some Unwise Experiments™ — Medievalist, Oct 28 '19 at 18:50
If it's an active repo, consider doing the `csv remove` earlier rather than later, so that ongoing copies don't receive the files. — Jeff Schaller, Oct 28 '19 at 18:52
If you don't need to stay with CVS, consider moving to distributed version control. — Faheem Mitha, Oct 28 '19 at 21:08
@FaheemMitha, we're moving to git, but need to clean up CVS first since it will be maintained read-only as an archival store. — Medievalist, Oct 29 '19 at 17:56

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 28 '19 at 19:22

You can delete the file from the Attic directory after removing it with cvs rm.

In your project directory, delete the file and commit the change:

cvs rm -f thefile
cvs commit -m 'deleted thefile' thefile

This moves the file thefile,v to the Attic directory in your CVSROOT/projectdir directory where you can delete it. Assuming you have set the CVSROOT environment variable, you can now do a

rm "$CVSROOT/projectdir/Attic/thefile,v"

and the file is gone with its history.

$ cvs stat thefile
cvs status: nothing known about `thefile'
===================================================================
File: no file thefile           Status: Unknown

   Working revision:    No entry for thefile
   Repository revision: No revision control file

how to remove dangerous stuff from old CVS commits?

1 Answers1