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windowsmercurialnon-alphanumeric

creating mercurial repo in directory whose name has dollar signs

I am trying to create a mercurial repository in a directory whose name includes dollar signs. This is an equivalent and simplified example of what i get on windows 10 cmd.exe with mercurial 4.1.3 : 

C:\test\dir1>hg init

C:\test\dir1>hg status

C:\test\dir1>cd ../dir$$1

C:\test\dir$$1>hg init

C:\test\dir$$1>hg status 
abort: repository C:\test\dir$$1 not found!

so i hope this is clear, the only difference seems to be the dollar signs in the second directory name. thanks in advance!

Solution

  • Mercurial seems to treat dollar signs as an environment variable escape:

    C:\test>set X=abc

C:\test>echo $X          # Not the shell expanding it, that would be %X%.
$X

C:\test>hg init $X

C:\test>dir
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is CE8B-D448

 Directory of C:\test

11/10/2017  09:27 PM    <DIR>          .
11/10/2017  09:27 PM    <DIR>          ..
11/10/2017  09:27 PM    <DIR>          abc
               0 File(s)              0 bytes
               3 Dir(s)  53,899,231,232 bytes free

    Mercurial has expanded $X as an environment variable. Also:

    C:\test>hg init dir$$x

C:\test>dir
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is CE8B-D448

 Directory of C:\test

11/10/2017  09:30 PM    <DIR>          .
11/10/2017  09:30 PM    <DIR>          ..
11/10/2017  09:30 PM    <DIR>          dir$x
               0 File(s)              0 bytes
               3 Dir(s)  53,899,091,968 bytes free

    Two dollar signs insert one dollar sign. When you are in a directory named dir$$x, Mercurial is using dir$x for the name. I found a workaround with hg -R. status, but better to avoid dollar signs.