When i do describe on "a.txt" ( a file in base CC vob) , i see "two visible paths" in the output and the file can be seen from both the paths.
In other words, a.txt is seen in two different folders and when you do a version tree, you see the same result from both the folders.i understand that it has got aliases.
What does this mean technically? Is it a sort of evil twin? it would be great if someone explains this in detail.
Is it a sort of evil twin?
Normally no, because an evil twin involves the same path (and different branches)
The technote "cleartool checkvob -evil_twin <vobtag> displays twins whose names are not identical" mentions the use of cleartool checkvob -evil_twin <vobtag> to check if a.txt is involved in an evil twin or not.
You can also use:
cleartool describe -aliases -all /var/tmp/myvob/a.txt
That is used primarily to identify an hard link:
You can also use cleartool find executed as follows from the root of the VOB:
cleartool find -all -exec 'cleartool describe -fmt "%[aliases]ACQp\n" $CLEARCASE_XPN'
This output will provide for you a list of all the elements in the VOB, and if a given element has more than one hardlink, the other hard link will be displayed after a comma in the list.
The output will look similar to the following:
"/vobs/TestVOB1@@/main/dir1/7/1.txt", "/vobs/TestVOB1@@/main/dir1/7/1.foo.txt"