view mercurial/help/filesets.txt @ 25122:755d23a49170

match: resolve filesets in subrepos for commands given the '-S' argument

This will work for any command that creates its matcher via scmutil.match(), but
only the files command is tested here (both workingctx and basectx based tests).
The previous behavior was to completely ignore the files in the subrepo, even
though -S was given.

My first attempt was to teach context.walk() to optionally recurse, but once
that was in place and the complete file list was built up, the predicate test
would fail with 'path in nested repo' when a file in a subrepo was accessed
through the parent context.

There are two slightly surprising behaviors with this functionality.  First, any
path provided inside the fileset isn't narrowed when it is passed to the
subrepo.  I dont see any clean way to do that in the matcher.  Fortunately, the
'subrepo()' fileset is the only one to take a path.

The second surprise is that status predicates are resolved against the subrepo,
not the parent like 'hg status -S' is.  I don't see any way to fix that either,
given the path auditor error mentioned above.

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.

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'...'``.

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.

The following predicates are supported:

.. predicatesmarker

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')"

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

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

See also :hg:`help patterns`.