CCFD is a little Unix program which adds "ClearCase intelligence" to any program run under its control. In this context, ClearCase intelligence means the program will automatically checkout elements before writing to them in a lazy (just-in-time) fashion. It can optionally checkin, mkelem, etc. automatically too. You may download the full package or view the man page or a short demo here. Installation notes are contained in the README file.
Currently the only platforms for which binaries exist are Solaris 8 (Sparc) and Redhat Linux 7.2 (i386). It's likely these would work for Solaris 9 and other Linux distributions based on glibc 2.2, respectively, but this has not been tested. It's even possible, though less likely, that they'd work on earlier versions. Ports to other platforms or versions are do-able (Windows excepted); contact me for details. And please note that the current release is alpha quality.
Although CCFD might at first seem like just a convenience package for people who don't like to checkout explicitly, it actually has more potential value in the scripting/infrastructure space. Things I've thought of:% ccfd -m -i -- gtar -xzf /tmp/newpackage.tar.gz % ccfd -m -i -- cp -r /tmp/newpackage . % ccfd -m -i -- cpio ...All these command lines will import a set of flat files into ClearCase, and when used in a populated VOB area will make only the required changes. They don't have the -r/emove feature the specialized tools do but otherwise this use is limited only by what what you can think of to put after the "--". And in fact it would be quite easy to whip up a post-processing script to hand the -remove part.
ccfd -misC -- smbd -Dthen add "projects" like this to smb.conf:
[myproject] comment = My Project path = /view/myview/vobs/myprojectNow a Windows client without any form of ClearCase installed can browse to that share and modify elements without ever knowing they're managed by ClearCase. Samba will check them out at open() and in at close(). It will even start the view if required. Believe it or not, this actually works (at least in limited testing).