view mercurial/help/pager.txt @ 40626:87a872555e90

revlog: detect incomplete revlog reads

_readsegment() is supposed to return N bytes of revlog revision
data starting at a file offset. Surprisingly, its behavior before
this patch never verified that it actually read and returned N
bytes! Instead, it would perform the read(), then return whatever
data was available. And even more surprisingly, nothing in the
call chain appears to have been validating that it received all
the data it was expecting.

This behavior could lead to partial or incomplete revision chunks
being operated on. This could result in e.g. cached deltas being
applied against incomplete base revisions. The delta application
process would happily perform this operation. Only hash
verification would detect the corruption and save us.

This commit changes the behavior of raw revlog reading to validate
that we actually read() the number of bytes that were requested.
We will raise a more specific error faster, rather than possibly
have it go undetected or manifest later in the call stack, at
delta application or hash verification.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D5266

Some Mercurial commands can produce a lot of output, and Mercurial will
attempt to use a pager to make those commands more pleasant.

To set the pager that should be used, set the application variable::

  [pager]
  pager = less -FRX

If no pager is set in the user or repository configuration, Mercurial uses the
environment variable $PAGER. If $PAGER is not set, pager.pager from the default
or system configuration is used. If none of these are set, a default pager will
be used, typically `less` on Unix and `more` on Windows.

.. container:: windows

  On Windows, `more` is not color aware, so using it effectively disables color.
  MSYS and Cygwin shells provide `less` as a pager, which can be configured to
  support ANSI color codes.  See :hg:`help config.color.pagermode` to configure
  the color mode when invoking a pager.

You can disable the pager for certain commands by adding them to the
pager.ignore list::

  [pager]
  ignore = version, help, update

To ignore global commands like :hg:`version` or :hg:`help`, you have
to specify them in your user configuration file.

To control whether the pager is used at all for an individual command,
you can use --pager=<value>:

  - use as needed: `auto`.
  - require the pager: `yes` or `on`.
  - suppress the pager: `no` or `off` (any unrecognized value
    will also work).

To globally turn off all attempts to use a pager, set::

  [ui]
  paginate = never

which will prevent the pager from running.