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P4 CLI Documentation | 2025.2

# A shortcut: p4 populate

If a target stream is completely empty (no files present, not even deleted files), P4 Server offers a command that automates the process of copying the files from an existing source stream and submitting the associated changelist.

For example, instead of populating a `release1.0` branch with the following two commands,

    p4 copy //Acme/main/project1/... //Acme/release1.0/project1/...
    p4 submit

you can use the `p4 populate` command to populate the stream with a single command:

    p4 populate //Acme/main/project1/... //Acme/release1.0/project1/...

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