How do I check if a file has ever been part of a CVS module?

Essentially I want to automate a checking process to see whether a
certain file has ever been a revision of a particular project. Is
there some sort of CVS checksum data I can access?

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Request for Question Clarification by mathtalk-ga on 23 Jun 2004 17:50 PDT

Hi, guyking-ga:

Are you thinking of effectively "diff'ing" a file against all
revisions of a file with the same name in a CVS module, to see if it
matches with any of them?

regards, mathtalk-ga

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Clarification of Question by guyking-ga on 23 Jun 2004 18:29 PDT

Yes that's right.

Just say I have a local file:

/myproject/foo/bar/test.php

I want to check if it is the exact same as the current file or any
revision of it on the CVS server:

/usr/cvs/myproject/foo/bar/test.php

Essentially I want to detect custom files in a project that are not
part of the CVS module.

Thanks!

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Request for Question Clarification by mathtalk-ga on 27 Jun 2004 15:24 PDT

Hi, guyking-ga:

The most elegant way I can see to do this, and it isn't "beautiful",
is to run a Perl script from the directory containing the various
files.
 
A CVS log command will tell you all the revisions of a given file that
have ever existed in the repository, and from parsing out the
revisions you could do a CVS diff between the existing file and each
of the previous versions (probably using the -s option, which I think
simplifies the diff output just to telling you if there is a
difference).

As far as I can tell CVS doesn't expose any revision by revision
"checksum" that could be tested as you originally proposed.

regards, mathtalk-ga