What do you call the tags in Subversion and CVS that add automatic content?

Question

Things like $log$ and $version$ which add data upon check-in to the file. I'm interested in seeing the other ones and what information they can provide, but I can't get much info unless I know what they are called.

Answer 1

Both Subversion and CVS call them Keywords.

Have a look in the SVN manual here (scroll down to svn:keywords) or here for CVS.

Answer 2

In SVN these are simply called "properties". You can read about them in the SVN book:

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.8/svn.advanced.props.html

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Err, so, are they called properties or keywords? Oh, I see. In SVN you can associate arbitrary metadata, called "properties", with versioned files; some of the properties you can set are to set up keyword substitution in the files themselves.

Answer 3

These are Keyword substitutions. The link to SVNBook 1.8 is here: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.8/svn.advanced.props.special.keywords.html.

Subversion's built-in keywords are:

• Date / LastChangedDate
• Revision / Rev / LastChangedRevision
• Author / LastChangedBy
• HeadURL / URL
• Id

The keywords are case sensitive, and remember to surround them with $.