view mercurial/help/filesets.txt @ 41987:c1d83d916e85

revert: option to choose what to keep, not what to discard

I know the you (the reader) are probably tired of discussing how `hg
revert -i -r .` should behave and so am I. And I know I'm one of the
people who argued that showing the diff from the working copy to the
parent was confusing. I think it is less confusing now that we show
the diff from the parent to the working copy, but I still find it
confusing. I think showing the diff of hunks to keep might make it
easier to understand. So that's what this patch provides an option
for.

One argument doing it this way is that most people seem to find `hg
split` natural. I suspect that is because it shows the forward diff
(from parent commit to the commit) and asks you what to put in the
first commit. I think the new "keep" mode for revert (this patch)
matches that.

In "keep" mode, all the changes are still selected by default. That
means that `hg revert -i` followed by 'A' (keep all) (or 'c' in
curses) will be different from `hg revert -a`. That's mostly because
that was simplest. It can also be argued that it's safest. But it can
also be argued that it should be consistent with `hg revert -a`.

Note that in this mode, you can edit the hunks and it will do what you
expect (e.g. add new lines to your file if you added a new lines when
editing). The test case shows that that works.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D6125

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*)"