Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

How to Stop Tracking a File

Once you decide that a file no longer belongs in your repository, use the hg remove command. This deletes the file, and tells Mercurial to stop tracking it (which will occur at the next commit). A removed file is represented in the output of hg status with an R.

$ hg init remove-example
$ cd remove-example
$ echo a > a
$ mkdir b
$ echo b > b/b
$ hg add a b
adding b/b
$ hg commit -m 'Small example for file removal'
$ hg remove a
$ hg status
R a
$ hg remove b
removing b/b

After you hg remove a file, Mercurial will no longer track changes to that file, even if you recreate a file with the same name in your working directory. If you do recreate a file with the same name and want Mercurial to track the new file, simply hg add it. Mercurial will know that the newly added file is not related to the old file of the same name.

Removing a File Does Not Affect Its History

It is important to understand that removing a file has only two effects:

• It removes the current version of the file from the working directory.

• It stops Mercurial from tracking changes to the file, from the time of the next commit.

Removing a file does not in any way alter the history of the file.

If you update the working directory to a changeset that was committed when it was still tracking a file that you later removed, the file will reappear in the working directory, with the contents it had when you committed that changeset. If you then update the working directory to a later changeset, in which the ...