Streams and Branching
Streams are the Helix term for branches. They are variant versions of a body of code. You can read more about them in the "Streams" chapter of the Helix Versioning Engine User Guide.
When using a personal server created by p4 init or p4 clone, Helix uses
streams as containers for your code. Helix will create a stream named main to
contain the content created or cloned. If, in working with your personal server,
you need to create new streams — also known as branching — you can do so with
the p4 switch command. You can then use merge and copy as normal to move
individual changes between streams.
Note
Although you can switch between streams on a shared server, you cannot use
p4 switch to create new streams on shared servers.
List streams
To display the current stream, issue p4 switch with no options.
$ p4 switch
mainmain is the default stream created by the p4 clone command.
Pass the -l option to p4 switch to list all known streams.
$ p4 switch -l
main *The asterisk indicates the current stream. As we haven’t yet created any other
streams, main is the only one listed and is the current stream.