using hg revert to revert a group of files in Mercurial

Question

I'm using Mercurial to read and debug a complex project, and my modify of the project can be divided into different group of files clearly. For example, if I modified four files

src1.cc src1.hh src2.cc src2.hh

It's apparent that I can divide them into two file groups such as group src1 includes src1.cc src1.hh and group src2 includes src2.cc src2.hh .

I'm wondering if I can revert a group of files by a simple command like 'hg revert group-name-alias' instead of listing all the filename of the group, which is a awful idea if I have modified many files?

Any help really appreciated!

Answer 1

From what I can understand of your use-case, you can:

1. Use patterns in the hg revert command. This means that you can run hg revert src1* to revert all the first group.

   Most probably, though, your stuff is in sub-folders and thankfully you can specify a parent folder to the revert command.

   So say your files are really like: foo/src1.cc , foo/src1.hh , bar/src2.cc , bar/src2.hh . In that case, you can revert all the second group with hg revert bar , assuming you're in the top folder. If you're already in the bar folder, you can run hg revert . .

   You can specify several patterns.

2. Use Mercurial queues if each one of your "file groups" is also a different unit of work (a different bug fix or feature). This is not so desirable if all files belong to the same unit of work, though.

Answer 2

No. To the best of my knowledge, Mercurial has no mechanism for grouping files.

You could do some trickery with aliases ( [alias] revert-group-name = revert src2.cc src2.hh in ~/.hgrc ), but aliases can only be prefixes, and can't perform variable expansions.

If your files are simple enough, you could use shell globbing ( hg revert src2* ), or a shell variable ( GROUP_NAME="src2.cc src2.hh" , then hg revert $GROUP_NAME ).

You could also consider writing a small Mercurial extension. If you know Python, they don't take very long (my first took me about 30 minutes).

Answer 3

If the filenames meet patterns, you can use that pattern:

hg revert src1* 

or

hg revert src1*.*

If those files are in a specific directory, you can do this:

hg revert dir\*

If the directory is more than one level deep and you want to get that directory and all its subdirectories, you can use this version of that commend:

hg revert dir\**\*