view mercurial/help/filesets.txt @ 40042:208303a8172c

obsolete: explicitly track folds inside the markers

We now record information to be able to recognize "fold" event from
obsolescence markers. To do so, we track the following pieces of information:

a) a fold ID. Unique to that fold (per successor),
b) the number of predecessors,
c) the index of the predecessor in that fold.

We will now be able to create an algorithm able to find "predecessorssets".

We now store this data in the generic "metadata" field of the markers.
Updating the format to have a more compact storage for this would be useful.

This way of tracking a fold through multiple markers could be applied to split
too. This would have two advantages:

1) We get a simpler format, since number of successors is limited to [0-1].
2) We can better deal with situations where only some of the split successors
   are pushed to a remote repository.

We should look into the relevance of such a change before updating the on-disk
format.

note: unlike splits, folds do not have to deal with cases where only some of
the markers have been synchronized. As they all share the same successor
changesets, they are all relevant to the same nodes.

Mercurial supports a functional language for selecting a set of
files.

Like other file patterns, this pattern type is indicated by a prefix,
'set:'. The language supports a number of predicates which are joined
by infix operators. Parenthesis can be used for grouping.

Identifiers such as filenames or patterns must be quoted with single
or double quotes if they contain characters outside of
``[.*{}[]?/\_a-zA-Z0-9\x80-\xff]`` or if they match one of the
predefined predicates. This generally applies to file patterns other
than globs and arguments for predicates. Pattern prefixes such as
``path:`` may be specified without quoting.

Special characters can be used in quoted identifiers by escaping them,
e.g., ``\n`` is interpreted as a newline. To prevent them from being
interpreted, strings can be prefixed with ``r``, e.g. ``r'...'``.

See also :hg:`help patterns`.

Operators
=========

There is a single prefix operator:

``not x``
  Files not in x. Short form is ``! x``.

These are the supported infix operators:

``x and y``
  The intersection of files in x and y. Short form is ``x & y``.

``x or y``
  The union of files in x and y. There are two alternative short
  forms: ``x | y`` and ``x + y``.

``x - y``
  Files in x but not in y.

Predicates
==========

The following predicates are supported:

.. predicatesmarker

Examples
========

Some sample queries:

- Show status of files that appear to be binary in the working directory::

    hg status -A "set:binary()"

- Forget files that are in .hgignore but are already tracked::

    hg forget "set:hgignore() and not ignored()"

- Find text files that contain a string::

    hg files "set:grep(magic) and not binary()"

- Find C files in a non-standard encoding::

    hg files "set:**.c and not encoding('UTF-8')"

- Revert copies of large binary files::

    hg revert "set:copied() and binary() and size('>1M')"

- Revert files that were added to the working directory::

    hg revert "set:revs('wdir()', added())"

- Remove files listed in foo.lst that contain the letter a or b::

    hg remove "set: listfile:foo.lst and (**a* or **b*)"