How to stop tracking a file without deleting it on Mercurial - mercurial

I saw this thread which discusses a solution for git, and found this thread on the mailing list for Mercurial (the thread is four years old though)
The solution proposed in the mailing list is to use hg rm -Af file (and they leave open the possibility of implementing this behavior as a new, more intuitive option). I'm wondering if that option exists now.
Also, if I try the command above:
> hg rm -Af my_file
> hg st
R my_file
there is an R next to my_file, but the file my_file is technically on disk, and I have told Mercurial to stop tracking it, so why am I getting R next to it?

You can just use hg forget or maybe add the file to your .hgignore file
And to answer the last question about the R in my_file. If you see the help for hg rm --help:
hg remove [OPTION]... FILE...
aliases: rm
remove the specified files on the next commit
Schedule the indicated files for removal from the current branch.
This command schedules the files to be removed at the next commit. To undo
a remove before that, see "hg revert". To undo added files, see "hg
forget".
Returns 0 on success, 1 if any warnings encountered.
options:
-A --after record delete for missing files
-f --force remove (and delete) file even if added or modified
-I --include PATTERN [+] include names matching the given patterns
-X --exclude PATTERN [+] exclude names matching the given patterns
[+] marked option can be specified multiple times
use "hg -v help remove" to show more info
As you can see you are forcing the deletion of that file and that's why you can see the R (Removed)

Related

Mercurial find files that have not been modified since a revision

I am trying to find a list of source files that have not been modified for the past few years.
This is one aspect I am trying to measure to try to help us understand the amount of stability and change in a given project over time.
Is there any way in mercurial to identify the files that have not been modified since a given revision?
There is some ambiguity in the question, but it can probably be answered using the status (st) command. For example, to obtain a listing based on a comparison of the files at revision R with those in the pwd, you could run:
hg st --rev R -cn
The -c option is equivalent to "--clean" (meaning in effect "no change").
To compare the files at revision R with those in the most recent commit:
hg st --rev R:-1 -cn
There are many ways to specify "R", e.g. 0 for the initial commit.
Posting my own answer.
I cloned the repository twice into new directories.
Then updated one to the current version and one to the original baseline revsion
hg update <rev>
Then used the diff command to find files that were identical (excluding whitespace changes)
diff -sqrbwB original current | grep "identical"
The diff flags are as follows:
-s reports identical files (facilitating the grep for "identical")
-q brief report (don't need a detailed report of differences)
-r recursively follow directories
-b ignore space changes
-w ignore all space
-B ignore Blank lines
Not sure if -b -w and -B are all necessary but it worked and output a list of files that have not chaged.

hg remove -I PATTERN, how it works?

Ho to remove all *.bak or *.orig files in mercurial?
example:
C:\dev\web>hg stat
? Views\System\UnderConstruction.cshtml.bak
? Views\Topic\Index.cshtml.bak
? Views\Topic\MasterPage.cshtml.bak
? Web.config.bak
C:\dev\web>hg rem -I *.bak
abort: no files specified
hg remove only removes files that have already been committed. AFAIK, there is no command in mercurial to remove untracked files.
To learn how file patterns work in mercurial, run hg help patterns.
Untracked files ("?" sign) can be removed by OS, not Mercurial
You have to leave files as is, just add patterns to .hgignore and after it files, matching patterns, will not apper in hg status anymore
Correct remove command for remove tracked bak and orig files will be hg remove -I **.bak -I **.orig
You should take a look at the hg purge extension:
Delete files not known to Mercurial. This is useful to test local and
uncommitted changes in an otherwise-clean source tree.
This means that purge will delete:
Unknown files: files marked with "?" by "hg status"
Empty directories: in fact Mercurial ignores directories unless they contain files under source control management
But it will leave untouched:
Modified and unmodified tracked files
Ignored files (unless --all is specified)
New files added to the repository (with "hg add")
If directories are given on the command line, only files in these
directories are considered.
Be careful with purge, as you could irreversibly delete some files you
forgot to add to the repository. If you only want to print the list of
files that this program would delete, use the --print option.
You can do the following two commands:
D:\workspace>hg purge -I **/*.orig --all
and then:
D:\workspace>hg purge -I **/*.bak --all
Tracked files won't be deleted, but I'm guessing that's not an issue for you. Make sure that you enable the purge extension before running this, and you can do dry runs with the --print argument.

Make Mercurial not to commit anything, unless the filenames are explicitly specified

according to Mercurial's commit help message:
If a list of files is omitted, all changes reported by "hg status" will be
committed.
Is there an easy way to change this behavior?
I'd like Mercurial not to commit any changes, unless the files are explicitly specified.
edit
I am on Linux and I am using the command line.
This seems to do the trick:
$ hg commit -X *
nothing changed
It doesn't do anything because all files are excluded, but if you give any files, those will be included.
You could alias it:
[alias]
xcommit = commit -X *
then:
$ hg status
M a
M b
$ hg xcommit -m 'no files specified'
nothing changed
$ hg xcommit -m 'picking a' a
$ hg status
M b
Personally I wouldn't want to get used to this type of workflow. It's usually just as easy to:
work in smaller chunks so your changes reflect a single changeset
for the times when you forget and you're on a coding spree, use something like hg record
for the really few times when the above two don't fit, use -I/-X for that single commit
if you are using GUI like tortoiseHg you can select the files you need to commit. http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/

Discard all and get clean copy of latest revision?

I'm moving a build process to use mercurial and want to get the working directory back to the state of the tip revision. Earlier runs of the build process will have modified some files and added some files that I don't want to commit, so I have local changes and files that aren't added to the repository.
What's the easiest way to discard all that and get a clean working directory that has the latest revision?
Currently I'm doing this:
hg revert --all
<build command here to delete the contents of the working directory, except the .hg folder.>
hg pull
hg update -r MY_BRANCH
but it seems like there should be a simpler way.
I want to do the equivalent of deleting the repo, doing a fresh clone, and an update. But the repo is too big for that to be fast enough.
Those steps should be able to be shortened down to:
hg pull
hg update -r MY_BRANCH -C
The -C flag tells the update command to discard all local changes before updating.
However, this might still leave untracked files in your repository. It sounds like you want to get rid of those as well, so I would use the purge extension for that:
hg pull
hg update -r MY_BRANCH -C
hg purge
In any case, there is no single one command you can ask Mercurial to perform that will do everything you want here, except if you change the process to that "full clone" method that you say you can't do.
hg up -C
This will remove all the changes and update to the latest head in the current branch.
And you can turn on purge extension to be able to remove all unversioned files too.
To delete untracked on *nix without the purge extension you can use
hg pull
hg update -r MY_BRANCH -C
hg status -un|xargs rm
Which is using
update -r --rev REV revision
update -C --clean discard uncommitted changes (no backup)
status -u --unknown show only unknown (not tracked) files
status -n --no-status hide status prefix
hg status will show you all the new files, and then you can just rm them.
Normally I want to get rid of ignored and unversioned files, so:
hg status -iu # to show
hg status -iun0 | xargs -r0 rm # to destroy
And then follow that with:
hg update -C -r xxxxx
which puts all the versioned files in the right state for revision xxxx
To follow the Stack Overflow tradition of telling you that you don't want to do this, I often find that this "Nuclear Option" has destroyed stuff I care about.
The right way to do it is to have a 'make clean' option in your build process, and maybe a 'make reallyclean' and 'make distclean' too.
If you're looking for a method that's easy, then you might want to try this.
I for myself can hardly remember commandlines for all of my tools, so I tend to do it using the UI:
1. First, select "commit"
2. Then, display ignored files. If you have uncommitted changes, hide them.
3. Now, select all of them and click "Delete Unversioned".
Done. It's a procedure that is far easier to remember than commandline stuff.

How can I recover a removed file in Mercurial (if at all)?

Accidentally, by using a GUI as opposed to CLI, I removed every file in a Mercurial project.
I recovered with Revert ok and lost some work, which as I have time machine I could easily get back. But is there a way of un-remove/undelete such files? Trawled through the manual and googled but cannot see anything. Any plugins?
I am probably answering my own question here but the files were gone from the directory and were not in the trash to recover so I am assuming Remove is irrevocable?
p.s. I know that hg forget or hg remove -Af will remove without deleting from the directory but my question has to do with the error I made as opposed to cool thinking the action through.
First, use hg grep to find the deleted file you wish to recover. The output of this command will show you the last revision for which the file was present, and the path to the deleted file.
Second, run hg revert -r <revision number> <path to deleted file>
The deleted file will now be in your working copy, ready to be committed back into head.
Quote from comment:
I set up a repository, committed all, Removed and then committed again
If this is the case then you just need to update the working directory to the previous revision:
$ hg update -C -r-2
Note the negative revision number. If the files you deleted aren't in the previous revision, you can find them by using:
$ hg log -v
For Mercurial 1.6 and above
If you know the name of the delete file you can find its revision easily with:
hg log -r "removes('NAME.c')"
This will give you the revision in witch a file called NAME.c (in the root) is deleted.
Then you can revert the file to the previous revision with (like other answers):
hg revert -r <revision number> <path to deleted file>
You can use a file name pattern instead to adapt to what you know, for example you can use **/NAME.c to search in all directories. You can read about it in File Name Patters. And use this link to know about the new revset specifications.
Well this worked for me.
hg revert -r revision pathToTheFile
An addition to the accepted answer - this is faster if you want to undo all removals in a commit. I deleted a large folder with a few hundred files in it and did hg addremove, which was not at all my intent, so had to undo all of those deletes.
Using Find deleted files in Mercurial repository history, quickly? + xargs + tr, revert all revision -3 removals to the version from revision -4:
hg log -r -3 --template "{rev}: {file_dels}\n" | tr ' ' '\n' | xargs hg revert -r -4
Note that this will fail if any of your files have spaces in the name; http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/customizing-the-output-of-mercurial.html doesn't appear to have any templates where {file_dels} is split by \n at the moment.
You can undo the last commit on a repo with hg rollback. There's only one level of rollback available, so if you did the remove with more than one commit, this won't completely undo your change. This only works on your local repository, so if you've pushed you won't be able to undo it in the remote repo.
You can remove committed revisions using the hg strip command, which is provided by the mq (Mercurial Queues) extension. This should give you back your files.
Make a backup before trying that out, because it will alter Mercurial's database of changesets.
The following worked for me.
hg revert -r <Revision Number> <File Name>
(Optional, to revert all files)
hg revert -r <Revision Number> --all
The below method is straightforward and so stupid that it cannot go wrong.
If you have deleted or renamed multiple files, it will be ok.
hg clone mydirectory mydirectory1
and now you start mc (or Far Manager) and compare what it was vs what it has become.
when it's done, just delete mydirectory1.