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## Overall structure of CVS commands

The overall format of all CVS commands is:

    cvs [ cvs_options ] cvs_command [ command_options ] [ command_args ]

`cvs`
  The name of the CVS program.
`cvs_options`
  Some options that affect all sub-commands of CVS. These are described below.
`cvs_command`
  One of several different sub-commands. Some of the commands have aliases that can be used instead; those aliases are noted in the reference manual for that command. There are only two situations where you may omit ``cvs_command'`: ``cvs -H'` elicits a list of available commands, and ``cvs -v'` displays version information on CVS itself.
`command_options`
  Options that are specific for the command.
`command_args`
  Arguments to the commands.

There is unfortunately some confusion between `cvs_options` and `command_options`. ``-l'`, when given as a `cvs_option`, only affects some of the commands. When it is given as a `command_option` is has a different meaning, and is accepted by more commands. In other words, do not take the above categorization too seriously. Look at the documentation instead.

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