What is the difference between hg forget and hg remove

Question

I want mercurial to remove several files from the current state of the repository  However  I want the files to exist in prior history   How do forget and remove differ  and can they do what I want

User · Accepted Answer

hg forget  is just shorthand for  hg remove -Af    From the  hg remove  help         and -Af can be used to remove files   from the next revision without   deleting them from the working   directory    Bottom line   remove  deletes the file from your working copy on disk  unless you uses -Af  and  forget  doesn t

User · Answer

From the documentation  you can apparently use either command to keep the file in the project history   Looks like you want remove  since it also deletes the file from the working directory   From the Mercurial book at http   hgbook red-bean com read       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    The man page hg 1  says this about forget      Mark the specified files so they will   no longer be tracked after the next   commit  This only removes files from   the current branch  not from the   entire project history  and it does   not delete them from the working   directory    And this about remove      Schedule the indicated files for   removal from the repository   This   only removes files from the current   branch  not from the entire project   history

User · Answer

The best way to put is that hg forget is identical to hg remove except that it leaves the files behind in your working copy  The files are left behind as untracked files and can now optionally be ignored with a pattern in  hgignore   In other words  I cannot tell if you used hg forget or hg remove when I pull from you  A file that you ran hg forget on will be deleted when I update to that changeset     just as if you had used hg remove instead

User · Answer

A file can be tracked or not  you use hg add to track a file and   hg remove or hg forget to un-track it   Using hg remove without   flags will both delete the file and un-track it  hg forget will   simply un-track it without deleting it

User · Answer

If you use  hg remove b  against a file with  A  status  which means it has been added but not commited  Mercurial will respond       not removing b  file has been marked for add  use forget to undo    This response is a very clear explication of the difference between remove and forget    My understanding is that  hg forget  is for undoing an added but not committed file so that it is not tracked by version control  while  hg remove  is for taking out a committed file from version control    This thread has a example for using hg remove against files of 7 different types of status

[version-control] What is the difference between hg forget and hg remove?

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