view mercurial/help/filesets.txt @ 39814:d059cb669632

wireprotov2: allow multiple fields to follow revision maps

The *data wire protocol commands emit a series of CBOR values.
Because revision/delta data may be large, their data is emitted
outside the map as a top-level bytestring value.

Before this commit, we'd emit a single optional bytestring
value after the revision descriptor map. This got the job done.
But it was limiting in that we could only send a single field.
And, it required the consumer to know that the presence of a
key in the map implied the existence of a following bytestring
value.

This commit changes the encoding strategy so top-level bytestring
values in the stream are explicitly denoted in a "fieldsfollowing"
key. This key contains an array defining what fields that follow
and the expected size of each field.

By defining things this way, we can easily send N bytestring
values without any ambiguity about their order. In addition,
clients only need to know how to parse ``fieldsfollowing`` to
know if extra values are present.

Because this breaks backwards compatibility, we've bumped the version
number of the wire protocol version 2 API endpoint.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D4620

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*)"