Question

I'm trying to get Mercurial to ignore my bin directory. I've tried it a few things, but it always reports the files as unknown (?).

C:\Hg\Apps\BITE\Web>hg status
? bin\AjaxControlToolkit.dll
? bin\BITE.dll
? bin\BITE.pdb

Then, I try:

C:\Hg\Apps\BITE\Web>hg remove bin

C:\Hg\Apps\BITE\Web>hg forget bin

C:\Hg\Apps\BITE\Web>hg commit -m "cleanup"
nothing changed

But, the status of each file remains the same:

C:\Hg\Apps\BITE\Web>hg status
? bin\AjaxControlToolkit.dll
? bin\BITE.dll
? bin\BITE.pdb

I thought when you hg remove, it stops tracking of the file(s) based on the filename, so anything reappearing (like, after a build) would still be untracked?

Answer 1

You should add bin folder to your .hgignore file inside the repo:

glob:bin/*

P.S. hg remove removes only files, not directories. If you haven't read a Joel's hg tutorial yet, maybe you should try it out.

Answer 2

To supplement Anton's answer, the ?s mean something. There are a few different indicators that hg st will put out:

• A - Added
• R - Removed
• M - Modified
• ! - Missing file (meaning that it is checked in, but not currently in the working directory)
• ? - Untracked file