Setting up your environment for anonymous access

Once you have downloaded the p4 binary and put it on your path, you want to set the following environment variables:

P4PORT   = perforce.scitechsoft.com:3488
P4USER   = anonymous
P4PASSWD = anonymous
P4CLIENT = YOURNAME_YOURMACHINE_YOUROS
P4EDITOR = (path to your favorite console editor, such as vi)

where you would replace YOURNAME_YOURMACHINE_YOUROS with a unique name (you can't use a client that someone else is already using anonymously!). For instance a valid client name might be: JOEBLOGGS_DEVEL_LINUX.

The client names the view that maintains the information about what files you have checked out on that system, and it must be unique for each user, and each machine. If you are doing development under multiple Operating Systems or multiple machines, you need a separate client view for each machine and each Operating System that will contain a copy of the source code from Perforce (hence the above naming convention for clients).

Once you have the above variables set up, you can see if Perforce can access our server by typing the following:

p4 info

You should see something similar to the following if it can connect successfully:

User name: anonymous
Client name: JOEBLOGGS_DEVEL_LINUX
Client host: MYMACHINE
Client root: c:\
Current directory: c:\scitech\src
Client address: 65.209.3.29:3643
Server address: perforce.scitechsoft.com:3488
Server root: /home/perforce
Server date: 2000/12/17 16:21:08 PST
Server version: P4D/LINUX52X86/2000.1/17250 (2000/09/11)
Server license: Scitech Software 58 users (support ends 2001/06/21)

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