view mercurial/help/filesets.txt @ 25018:93e015a3d1ea

commit: add ui.allowemptycommit config option

This adds a config flag that enables a user to make empty commits.
This is useful in a number of cases.

For instance, automation that creates release branches via
bookmarks may want to make empty commits to that release bookmark so that it
can't be fast-forwarded and so it can record information about the release
bookmark's creation. This is already possible with named branches, so making it
possible for bookmarks makes sense.

Another case we've wanted it is for mirroring repositories into Mercurial. We
have automation that syncs commits into hg by running things from the command
line. The ability to produce empty commits is useful for syncing unusual commits
from other VCS's.

In general, allowing the user to create the DAG as they see fit seems useful,
and when I mentioned this in IRC more than one person piped up and said they
were already hacking around this limitation by using mq, import, and
commit-dummy-change-then-amend-the-content-away style solutions.

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`.