[p4] Erasing sync history?

[Roy Smith]

A colleague recently removed a workspace by doing "rm -rf" on the  
root directory.  He thought he was done working on that branch and  
wanted to free us some disk space.

Some time later, he had to work on that branch again and so he just  
did a "p4 sync" on that client, and was surprised when only a small  
number of files appeared.  The answer, of course, is that perforce  
didn't know he had removed the directory and only updated the files  
that had changed since his last sync.

I know you can do a "sync -f", and told him to do that, but he's  
looking for something more.  He's looking for a way to tell perforce  
that the files no longer exist on local storage, so the next time he  
does a "p4 sync", (without the -f), they come back.

Is the answer to do the "rm -rf", and then do a "p4 flush"?  It  
sounds promising, but it's not really clear from the help text what  
this is supposed to do.

I'm not exactly sure what's motivating him to find something better  
than "p4 sync -f", but I told him I would research it.  I think he  
may be worried that keeping track of the metadata about what files  
he's got in his workspace may be wasting resources on the server.  I  
told him I thought the storage needed to that was pretty minimal, but  
that's just a guess.  Is it?

-------------------
Roy Smith <smith_roy at emc.com>
Software Guy, EMC Common Management Group
44 South Broadway, 7th floor
White Plains, NY 10601
(914) 580-3427
AIM: roysmith649