Shelving in Perforce allows users to store and share file snapshots on the central server. This feature is useful for allowing others to review your work, moving your progress to another workspace, validating builds on multiple platforms, and preserving your work so that you can work on another project.

It’s important to remember that shelving is not a check-in. The files stored have no version history associated with them because the shelf is simply a temporary place to keep a file.

To shelve your files in Perforce, right click the changelist, and then choose Shelve to display the Shelve dialog.

Because there is no shelf for the default changelist, you must enter a description for a new pending changelist to shelve files if you are shelving from the default changelist.

You can shelve a more recent version of a file already on a shelf by simply replacing the currently-shelved version with the changed version. Select the file, right click, and then select Shelve to overwrite the previous version.

To unshelve files, select the changelist containing the shelved files, right-click, and then select Unshelve Files. A dialog box opens for you to select the destinations where you want the unshelved files to appear. Note that you could unshelve the files simply by dragging them back to the desired changelist. The workspace is restored to its original state, and you can resume work where you left off.

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