Special Notes about Perforce on Windows/NT, Win95, and OS/2.

• The NT and OS/2 clients and the NT server, like the UNIX clients and servers, are the plain executables. They will eventually be replaced by self-unpacking ZIP files that have setup program familiar to Windows users.

• The Win95 client expects the variable USERNAME to be set (as it is on NT). Set this to something resembling a login name. Note that the user name is used to identify open files and changes.

• By default, the NT client uses notepad as an editor and windiff as a diff program. If $SHELL is set, it is assumed that the user has the MKS toolkit and so vi and diff are used instead. These can be overridden by setting the variables EDITOR and DIFF, respectively. In general, the MKS toolkit is highly recommended.

• By default, the OS/2 client uses the same defaults for editor and diff programs as does UNIX, namely vi and diff. These can be overridden by setting the variables EDITOR and DIFF, respectively.

• On OS/2 there's no native diff program, and the Perforce client needs one. The Hobbes Ready-To-Run CD from Walnut Creek CDROM includes the GNU diff along with the rest of the GNU collection. This CD is well worth it to OS/2 users, and you can even download as much as you want from the Walnut Creek CDROM web server.

• On NT the Perforce client executable performs wildcard expansion directly (via setargv.obj) rather than relying on the shell. While this works well with both the DOS box (which doesn't do wildcard expansion) and the MKS Korn Shell (which does), it means that to get a * past the Perforce client under the Korn Shell, you must quote it twice (i.e. '"*"'): once to get past the Korn Shell, and once to get past the wildcard expansion in the Perforce client.

• The NT server needs a working UNIX-like diff(1) program. Either the MKS one or the GNU one works fine. If you need to, you can download the GNU diff executable for NT from the download page.

• The NT server needs a directory for temporary files. This is controlled by the system settings for the variable TEMP. This directory must exist for the server to operate properly.

• The Perforce server on NT is a single-threading server, meaning that a single process and thread satisfies all user request. Thus if one user is holding up the server (with a long get command or some such), all users will wait.