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P4 CLI Documentation | 2026.1

# File handling

When adding files, P4 Server:

- Examines the typemap table to see if the system administrator has defined a file type for the file(s) being added. If a match is found, the file’s type is set as defined in the typemap table, which you can modify with the p4 typemap command.
- If a match is not found, P4 Server examines the first bytes of the file based on the filetype.maxtextsize configurable to determine whether it is `text` or `binary`. The files are stored in the depot accordingly.

By default, text file revisions are stored in reverse delta format. Newly-added text files larger than the limit imposed by the `filetype.maxtextsize` configurable are assigned filetype `text+C` and stored in full.

Files compressed in the `.zip` format, including `.jar` files, are also automatically detected and assigned the type `ubinary`. Other binary revisions are stored in full, with compression.

Files in unicode environments are detected differently. To learn more, see the Internationalization Notes.

P4 Server administrators can use:

- The type mapping feature (`p4 typemap`) to override the default file type detection mechanism. This feature is useful for `binary` file formats (such as Adobe PDF or Rich Text Format) where files can start with large portions of ASCII text, and might otherwise be mistaken for `text` files.
- The `filesys.binaryscan` and `filetype.maxtextsize` configurables (see `p4 configure`) to change the default limits for text/binary detection and the RCS text file size limit.

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