Bulk Update With Mercurial
Some of you may well know that I was previously an subversion user, more out of comfort than necessity. SVN was the first version control system that I became well acquainted with, so it just seemed like a natural choice for me when I thought I needed version control.
Several months ago I read a blog article by a buddy, in which he briefly discussed Mercurial. I had been meaning to give some distributed version control systems a shot after some disasters related to the centralized nature of SVN. This blog article prompted me to take a stab at Mercurial and some others.
Within a few days I was sold on Mercurial. I won't go into details simply because I'm not one for religious wars that way. Let's just say that Mercurial seemed to be perfect for my wants and needs.
There were, however, a few things about using Mercurial that I miss from the SVN world. One such thing is that you can update several "working copies" of something in SVN with a single command. For example, I keep a lot of my 3rd party Django applications in one directory. Many of these applications use SVN. Sometimes I'll just run a command like this:
svn up /path/to/third/party/apps/*
Each project that uses SVN will automatically be updated without much fuss with such a command. However, with Mercurial, it appears that you need to be in an actual Mercurial repository in order to update it. There are extensions to get around this problem, but I was looking for something a little different.
Since I use Linux almost exclusively, I didn't feel bad about just using the power within to do the work. The following command does everything I need it to:
find -name ".hg" -type d | xargs -t -i bash -c "(cd {}; hg pull; hg up)"
This command finds any directories called .hg anywhere under your current location on the filesystem. Any matches will be used in the command at the end: cd {}; hg pull; hg up
So far I haven't had any problems with this command, but your mileage may vary. To make things even easier, I made an alias for this rather long command:
alias hgupall='find -name ".hg" -type d | xargs -t -i bash -c "(cd {}; hg pull; hg up)"'
I put that line in my ~/.bashrc script, which is executed each time I log into my computer. With that in place, all I need to do is something like this:
cd /path/to/third/party/apps hgupall
And the aliased command handles the rest. Pretty slick stuff. Hooray for Mercurial and Linux!