Build and Release Management » Perforce

p4:// “no permission for operation on files(s)” Problem?

admin — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 23:04:33 +0000

If you ever tried to do an integration activity in Perforce and have gotten a similar error message such as “no permission for operation on files(s)” then these are the steps you can do to resolve the problem:

Check to make sure your branch spec or the source/target does not have any typo.
Check to make sure you are branching within a source tree such as //softwareX/branches/1.0/… //softwareX/branches/1.1/… and NOT //softwareX/branches/1.0/… to //softwareY/branches/1.1/…
Check p4 protect to make sure your account has write permission within that code line.

Perforce password (P4PASSWD) invalid or unset error

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:58:11 +0000

If you have gotten “Perforce password (P4PASSWD) invalid or unset” error message when you’ve switched to the ticket based authentication, here’s what you can do to fix the problem:

p4 login -p -a

Simple. Straight forward.

Importing a new Project in Perforce

admin — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:22:21 +0000

I ran into another not-so-clear Perforce error message today while trying to import a new project to an existing depot. I had a new project1 which I wanted to import into the existing // depot, but when I tried to add via P4V or ‘p4 add’ in the command line, I kept getting this message:

D:\Work\P4>p4 client myproject_foo
Error in client specification.
Mapping ‘//some_directory/…’ is not under ‘//some_other_directory/…’.
Hit return to continue…

After fumbling around, I found that I had to create a depot first as the superuser in the command line before I can import/add the new project:

p4 depot new_project

Then now I can add new project to my clientspec in the command line like this:

p4 client (it will open a notepad window, just add your new project under the ‘View:’ section, save, and close)

Now you can do ‘p4 add’ or using P4V to import your new project.

//projectfoo/bar/… – must refer to client ‘p4_client’.

admin — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:01:35 +0000

Ever run into this error with Perforce’s ‘p4 changes’ or any other similar command?

//projectfoo/bar/… – must refer to client ‘some_p4_client’.?

I ran into this exact problem today. I was trying to do a ‘p4 changes //projectfoo/bar/…@xxxxxx,yyyyyy’ to get a history of the changelist and got that error. The symptoms were that doing the same command on other projects within the depot worked perfectly fine as well as trying it on another platform and system.

After googling and running into a brick wall, I started to scrutinize the depot and the naming convention then bam! I Found the solution!

Turns out that inside the depot, “projectfoo” is actually “ProjectFoo.” Do you see the difference yet? Now I tried ‘p4 changes //ProjectFoo/bar/…@xxxxxx,yyyyyy’ and it magically worked.

In short, Perforce is extremely case sensitive when it comes to the command operations. Generally, its a good practice to keep everything within the depot as lower case to avoid unique problems like these.