hg remove directory from repo? - mercurial

I'd like to remove a directory and all the files in it from a repo.
I have removed all the files with hg remove, but how do I remove the directory itself?
Will it just automatically vanish once I commit all the removed files?

Yes. Because mercurial doesn't track directories at all, only files, it only creates directories that have files in them, and if someone hg updates to a revision any directories that become empty are automatically removed. So if you do:
hg remove directory/*
hg commit -m 'removed all files in directory'
hg update -r 0 # updates to a different revision
hg update tip # jump back to the tip
That last update would remove the directory. For everyone else it's even easier. When they hg update to your new changes their directory will just vanish (provided they have no uncommitted file in it).

hg remove dir
If you end up with empty directories and you want to get rid of them, an easy way is the purge extension. (add purge= under the [extensions] group in your .hrgc file to unlock).
You can then use
hg purge
to clean up the empty dirs... You must be careful with the purge command as it removes everything that is untracked in your repos. I strongly suggest you run a
hg purge -p
beforehand to see what the command will do ( -p will print a "test run" without doing anything.) Never forget the --help option! ;)
edit: I prefer using purge to hg update in succession as updating triggers rebuilds in my IDE if it is open (and it's a good bet it is when I do that). hg purge will probably be smoother. And you can use --all to include ignored files too (must be careful though).

To remove a directory, Just do
hg remove <dir>
hg commit -m "..."
This will remove the directory and all files under it.

Related

Mercurial: how to revert changes purging files except those ignored (covered by '.hgignore')?

I made some exploratory changes to my code in a project under mercurial version control, so afterwards I wanted to discard all changes and go back to the last version in the remote repo.
hg pull
hg update -r default -C
hg --config "extensions.purge=" purge --all
What I didn't realize is that this will delete any untracked file, including those ignored. In particular eclipse directories like .settings. Obviously I don't want to delete those.
I know I can use patterns with the purge command, and most of the time I will want to use it only with changes under the source code directory, but if I had made changes not only under src, but also config, added a file at project directory level and whatnot, is there any way that purge could automatically pull files and directories from the .hgignore file to be excluded so I don't have to think all that directories and files in which I have untracked files?
Well... you explicitly used a flag which means "delete everything, even if ignored". From hg help purge:
--all purge ignored files too
So it should work, if you skip the '--all' parameter to purge.

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.

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.

Mercurial update not working

I'm using Mercurial 1.7.2 Windows
I have a local repo where I copied some files into.Now I'd like to remove these files. I tried to use revert and update but those files are still there.
I tried these commands
hg revert --all
nothing, files stll there
hg update null
still nothing
I ran these commands from my repo using the commandline
Use PurgeExtension. It's a plugin for Mercurial. Purge is shipepd with Mercurial but by default is this plugin inactive. Enable it and then use:
hg purge
Try hg status. If it lists the files you copied there as unknown, all you need to do is delete them manually, as mercurial isn't tracking them anyway. Otherwise, you need to tell mercurial to forget or delete them from the repo. (e.g. hg forget foo.bar). Conversely, mercurial will not track new files until you tell it to, so if you copy files into your local repo, you need to do hg add foo.bar and then hg commit to make mercurial track them.
try:
hg remove
or look into the hg backout command

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.