Mercurial - why can't I find deleted files?

Question

I recently let the IDE replace a trivial text in the entire project, and recognized that mistake only after committing other changes to Mercurial. I panicked and (knowing very little about Mercurial, now after having read the definitive guide starting to get to know it better) tried every command that seemed to make my mistake "go away". It goes without saying that this was a move I am not proud of.

Of the things I remember to have tried was hg update tip and hg rollback. Since I'm using Mercurial on my local machine only and do not pull or push from any other repository, I think these commands did not cause my main problem: There are a lot of files missing now -exactly the files I let the IDE make the wrong replacements in.

What bothers me is that I have done hg status --change REV to find all files changed in a revision, and the deleted files do not show up there.

PHPStorm has a local history, which shows which files are now missing. That (only that?) enables me to hunt down the individual files and revert to their last known revision:

hg log -l 1 path/to/foo.txt
hg revert -r <my revision> path/to/foo.txt

... but that is way too time-consuming for the hundreds of files that got changed. Please tell me there's a better way. The PHPStorm history is nice and can restore the files as well, but it will restore them to the point where they had already been erroneously changed.

Your help is greatly appreciated, and I vow to learn & appreciate Mercurial as more than just a context menu item starting today.

Answer 1

If you are willing to lose the changes that were committed with or since the error, you may be able to go back to the revision just before the error, and start working from there. Use hg log to find out which revision you need, and hg update --rev XX to go to that revision. If you're not sure which revision you want, update to various revisions and take a look.

Once you have updated to the correct revision, you can just continue working from there. The next time you commit, you will automatically create a new branch on which you'll be working, which will not have the error in it. If you want, you can go back to the original branch and close it.

You might even be able to get back any correct commits that happened after you committed the error up to the revision you rolled back to. On the old branch, identify the revision after the error, and do a diff between that revision and the tip of that branch. Then, see if you can apply the diff as a patch on your new branch. You will still lose any changes that were in the same commit as the error, though.