I have two streams. They are both children development streams of a parent mainline stream that contains two folders, a smaller (let’s say 400GB) and a larger (let’s say 2TB) folder.

I currently have one of them bound in a workspace, however, I have only synced the smaller folder, the larger one does not exist on my disk.

The problem is, if I do p4 switch <other_stream>, p4 will iterate through all files in the large folder (since it doesn’t exist on my disk, but does exist in the stream I’m switching to) and try to sync them. The reconcile bit of the command also takes a lot of time.

I know that p4 switch does p4 reconcile and p4 sync of some form in the background, but I couldn’t find info on what exactly.

Running p4 switch -Rn --no-sync <other_stream> does complete very quickly, but I still have to make sure the versions of the files matches the version in the stream.

I tried doing p4 reconcile or p4 reconcile -k, but it was painfully slow. When I ran p4 switch <other_stream> originally, before it started sifting through the larger folder, it ran reconcile over the smaller one in mere seconds. But I don’t know which flags it used internally.

All in all, how do I switch stream in perforce while excluding one or more folders in the process of switching (because I don’t have the files synced locally)?