Can you remove a file from Mercurial without removing it from the filesystem like Git?

Question

I've got some files in a repo that I don't want tracked, is it possible to remove them without removing the actual files from the filesystem?

This would be equivalent to git's rm --cached.

Solution 1

You can use hg forget <file> if files have just been added, however if the files have already been committed use hg rm --after <file>.

The help is a bit misleading, it should be hg rm --do-not-touch-the-filesystem.

Solution 2

It looks like hg forget is what I was looking for according to this.

This will mark a file so that it is no longer tracked after the next commit.

Solution 3

If you need to remove the file from Mercurial history as well, here's a stackoverflow question on how you do this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3558365/mercurial-remove-file-from-all-changesets/

Comments

[ghickman]

I've ignored them but they're already tracked in the repo and have changes so are showing up.