How to search the text of changelist descriptions in Perforce

I recommend the opposite for automatic build systems: you should first get the latest changelist from the server using:

p4 changes -s submitted -m1

then sync to that change and record it in the revision info. The reason is as follows. Although Perforce recommends the following to determine the changelist to which the workspace is synced:

p4 changes -m1 @clientname

they note a few gotchas:

• This only works if you have not submitted anything from the workspace in question.
• It is also possible that a client workspace is not synced to any specific changelist.

and there's an additional gotcha they don't mention:

• If the highest changelist to which the sync occured strictly deleted files from the workspace, the next-highest changelist will be reported (unless it, too, strictly deleted files).

If you must sync first and record later, Perforce recommends running the following command to determine if you've been bit by the above gotchas; it should indicate nothing was synced or removed:

p4 sync -n @changelist_number

The simple answer is:

p4 changes -l "...#>have"

You need the quotes to avoid your shell doing redirection.

You can trivially iterate over the changes and call "p4 describe" on each one.

You can get a full diff by using "p4 diff2" (assuming you want a unidiff):

p4 diff2 -du ...#have ...#head

But that doesn't give you a per-changelist diff.