mercurial/help/patterns.txt

rebase: improve error message on improper phases

The previous error message had two issues: The first issue was that it
wasn't, in fact, an error but a warning, even though it described a
fatal error condition preventing the successful completion of the
command. The second was that it didn't mention the immutable
changesets, leaving the user guessing at the true cause of the error.

The main downside to this change is that we now get an 'abort: can't
abort...' message which technically contradicts itself. In this case,
I blame that on the two uses we have for the word; if it weren't for
backwards compatibility, we could make util.Abort print out 'error:
<whatever>'.

Mercurial accepts several notations for identifying one or more files
at a time.

By default, Mercurial treats filenames as shell-style extended glob
patterns.

Alternate pattern notations must be specified explicitly.

.. note::
  Patterns specified in ``.hgignore`` are not rooted. 
  Please see :hg:`help hgignore` for details.

To use a plain path name without any pattern matching, start it with
``path:``. These path names must completely match starting at the
current repository root.

To use an extended glob, start a name with ``glob:``. Globs are rooted
at the current directory; a glob such as ``*.c`` will only match files
in the current directory ending with ``.c``.

The supported glob syntax extensions are ``**`` to match any string
across path separators and ``{a,b}`` to mean "a or b".

To use a Perl/Python regular expression, start a name with ``re:``.
Regexp pattern matching is anchored at the root of the repository.

To read name patterns from a file, use ``listfile:`` or ``listfile0:``.
The latter expects null delimited patterns while the former expects line
feeds. Each string read from the file is itself treated as a file
pattern.

Plain examples::

  path:foo/bar   a name bar in a directory named foo in the root
                 of the repository
  path:path:name a file or directory named "path:name"

Glob examples::

  glob:*.c       any name ending in ".c" in the current directory
  *.c            any name ending in ".c" in the current directory
  **.c           any name ending in ".c" in any subdirectory of the
                 current directory including itself.
  foo/*.c        any name ending in ".c" in the directory foo
  foo/**.c       any name ending in ".c" in any subdirectory of foo
                 including itself.

Regexp examples::

  re:.*\.c$      any name ending in ".c", anywhere in the repository

File examples::

  listfile:list.txt  read list from list.txt with one file pattern per line
  listfile0:list.txt read list from list.txt with null byte delimiters

See also :hg:`help filesets`.