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<HEAD><TITLE>FAQ</TITLE></HEAD>
<H1>Frequently Asked (or Anticipated) Questions</H1><HR>
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<P>Release Engineering is always eager and willing to support our Development and QA user communities.  Send email to <A HREF="mailto:P4Admin@EDITME-EMAILADDRESS">Release Engineering</A> to add your question to the FAQ.</P>
<HR><H2>General Questions</H2>
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<LI>Q: Who are the Perforce Administrators?
<LI>A: The Perforce Admin Group in Perforce consists of the following users:</P>
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<LI><A HREF="mailto:Perforce.Admin@EDITME-EMAILADDRESS">Perforce Admin</A>
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<LI>Q:  How do I install Perforce?
<LI>A:  <A HREF="InstallPerforce.htm">Click here</A>.
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<LI>Q:  How do I add an entire directory tree to Perforce?
<LI>A:  See <A HREF="http://www.perforce.com/perforce/technotes/note012.html">Perforce Tech Note 12</A>.
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<LI>Q:  How do I get comfortable working from the DOS Prompt?
<LI>A:  <A HREF="UsingCommandLine.htm">Click here</A>.
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<LI>Q:  How do I use Perforce from the Command Line?
<LI>A:  <A HREF="UsingCommandLine-P4.htm">Click here</A>.
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<LI>Q:  How do I make Perforce the default source control provider for Visual Studio?
<LI>A:  This <A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;319318">MSDN article</A> shows how to change the default source control provider that VisualStudio and systems use.
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<LI>Q:  How I get Perforce to cleanup empty directories after I remove files from my workspace?
<LI>A:  Set the 'Remove Directories' attribute of your workspace.</P>
<P>By default, Perforce won't remove empty directories as it goes, but you can change that behavior.</P>
<P>Do '<CODE>p4 client <I>clientname</I></CODE>' to bring up the client spec form in notepad or vi, then change '<CODE>normdir</CODE>' to '<CODE>rmdir</CODE>' on the Options line, then save and exit the editor.</P>
<P>That will clean up empty directories once the last file is removed from the directory, either via '<CODE>p4 delete</CODE>' or even '<CODE>p4 sync ...#0</CODE>'.  It will only clean up completely empty directories, so it only works if there aren't any view private files (e.g. *.o files or other derived objects) sitting around in the directory structure.  You can think of it as doing a safe '<CODE>rmdir</CODE>', not an '<CODE>/bin/rm rf</CODE>'.</P>
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<HR><H2>"Have you seen this error?" Questions</H2>
<UL>
<LI>Q:  Have you seen this error:  "<CODE>Bad parameters passed to mangler</CODE>"?
<LI>A:  Yes, and this can be fixed easily.</P>

Andy Janes from GTech Corporation reported seeing this error.  The command, '<CODE>p4 -u ylegere client -o</CODE>', generated this output:</P>
<PRE>
Date 2004/12/17 11:13:41:
Operation: user-client
Operation 'user-client' failed.
Bad parameters passed to mangler!
</PRE>
<P>This indicates that the password field in the user spec somehow contained an invalid character, perhaps a Unicode character.  To fix it, delete and then recreate the user's account.  Do the following as a P4 super user:</P>
<PRE>
   p4 user o ylegere > user.txt
</PRE>
<P>Edit the user.txt file; delete the Update:, Access:, and Password: fields.  Then, delete and recreate the user's account like this:</P>
<PRE>
p4 user d f ylegere
p4 user I < user.txt
p4 passwd P hello ylegere
</PRE>
<P>Note:  Do <B>NOT</B> use the <A HREF="../Admin/RemoveUsers.pl.htm">RemoveUsers.pl</A> utility, since this will cause Perforce to forget what groups the user has access to.</P>
<P>So far, this has been reported only once, and on Windows.</P>
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<P><I>Last updated Mon, 21 Feb 2005, 19:13:33 ET</I></P>
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#	Change	User	Description
#1	11764	C. Thomas Tyler	Populate -b perforce-software-p4bbi-dev.
//guest/perforce_software/p4bbi/main/test/baselines/FGS-1.1.p2/docs/FAQ/index.htm
#1	9147	C. Thomas Tyler	Added inital version of P4BBI to The Perforce Workshop.