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P4 CLI Documentation | 2025.1

# How P4 Server manages files in a workspace

P4 Server manages the files in a client workspace as follows:

- Files in the workspace are created, updated, and deleted as determined by your changes.
- Write permission is enabled when you edit a file, and disabled when you submit your changes.

The state of your workspace is tracked and managed by P4 Server. To avoid conflicts with the file management performed by P4 Server applications, do not manually change read-only permission settings on files. P4 Server has commands that help you determine whether or not the state of your client workspace corresponds to P4 Server’s record of that state; see Work offline for details.

Files in the workspace that you have not put under P4 Server control are ignored by P4 Server. For example, compiled objects, libraries, executables, and developers’ temporary files that are created while developing software but not added to the depot are not affected by P4 Server commands.

By default, when you create a client workspace, the entire depot is mapped to your workspace. You can refine this mapping to view only a portion of the depot and to change the correspondence between depot and workspace locations, by refining the workspace view, as described in Configure workspace views.

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