revert

Purpose:

Set files in the working tree back to the contents of a previous revision.

Usage:

brz revert [FILE…]

Options:

--forget-merges

Remove pending merge marker, without changing any files.

-h, --help

Show help message.

--no-backup

Do not save backups of reverted files.

-q, --quiet

Only display errors and warnings.

-r ARG, --revision=ARG

See “help revisionspec” for details.

--usage

Show usage message and options.

-v, --verbose

Display more information.

Description:

Giving a list of files will revert only those files. Otherwise, all files will be reverted. If the revision is not specified with ‘–revision’, the working tree basis revision is used. A revert operation affects only the working tree, not any revision history like the branch and repository or the working tree basis revision.

To remove only some changes, without reverting to a prior version, use merge instead. For example, “merge . -r -2..-3” (don’t forget the “.”) will remove the changes introduced by the second last commit (-2), without affecting the changes introduced by the last commit (-1). To remove certain changes on a hunk-by-hunk basis, see the shelve command. To update the branch to a specific revision or the latest revision and update the working tree accordingly while preserving local changes, see the update command.

Uncommitted changes to files that are reverted will be discarded. However, by default, any files that have been manually changed will be backed up first. (Files changed only by merge are not backed up.) Backup files have ‘.~#~’ appended to their name, where # is a number.

When you provide files, you can use their current pathname or the pathname from the target revision. So you can use revert to “undelete” a file by name. If you name a directory, all the contents of that directory will be reverted.

If you have newly added files since the target revision, they will be removed. If the files to be removed have been changed, backups will be created as above. Directories containing unknown files will not be deleted.

The working tree contains a list of revisions that have been merged but not yet committed. These revisions will be included as additional parents of the next commit. Normally, using revert clears that list as well as reverting the files. If any files are specified, revert leaves the list of uncommitted merges alone and reverts only the files. Use brz revert . in the tree root to revert all files but keep the recorded merges, and brz revert --forget-merges to clear the pending merge list without reverting any files.

Using “brz revert –forget-merges”, it is possible to apply all of the changes from a branch in a single revision. To do this, perform the merge as desired. Then doing revert with the “–forget-merges” option will keep the content of the tree as it was, but it will clear the list of pending merges. The next commit will then contain all of the changes that are present in the other branch, but without any other parent revisions. Because this technique forgets where these changes originated, it may cause additional conflicts on later merges involving the same source and target branches.

See also:

cat, export, merge, shelve