Getting Started

To begin, we’ll use the hg version command to find out whether Mercurial is installed properly. The actual version information that it prints isn’t so important; we simply care whether the command runs and prints anything at all.

$ hg version
Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 5d25b2f59ade)

Copyright (C) 2005-2008 Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com> and others
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Built-In Help

Mercurial provides a built-in help system. This is invaluable for those times when you find yourself stuck trying to remember how to run a command. If you are completely stuck, simply run hg help; it will print a brief list of commands, along with a description of what each does. If you ask for help on a specific command (as below), it prints more detailed information.

$ hg help init
hg init [-e CMD] [--remotecmd CMD] [DEST]

create a new repository in the given directory

    Initialize a new repository in the given directory. If the given
    directory does not exist, it is created.

    If no directory is given, the current directory is used.

    It is possible to specify an ssh:// URL as the destination.
    See 'hg help urls' for more information.

options:

 -e --ssh        specify ssh command to use
    --remotecmd  specify hg command to run on the remote side

use "hg -v help init" to show global options

For a more impressive level of detail (which you won’t usually need) run hg help

Get Mercurial: The Definitive Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial