(you might first want to read UnderstandingMercurial)

A tutorial on using Mercurial

This tutorial is an introduction to using ["Mercurial"]. We don't assume any particular background in using ["SCM"] software. This tutorial is also available in [wiki:FrenchTutorial French], [wiki:SpanishTutorial Spanish], [wiki:JapaneseTutorial Japanese], and [wiki:ChineseTutorial Chinese].

After you work through this tutorial, you should have a grasp of the following:

It is also strongly recommended that you have a look at the Mercurial man pages [http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hg.1.html hg(1)] and [http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hgrc.5.html hgrc(5)], which are in the source tree as doc/hg.1.txt and doc/hgrc.5.txt.

How to read this tutorial

The formatting convention is simple. Command names and parameters are displayed in fixed font.

A line of input that you should type into your shell or command prompt is displayed in a fixed font, and the line will start with a $ character.

A line of output that you should expect ["Mercurial"] or your shell to display is displayed in a fixed font, but with no special character at the start of the line. 

$ this is a line of user input
this is a line of program output

We use the bash shell in all examples. The concepts remain the same for other Unix shells and the Windows command.exe, but the syntax of some operations may change. For example, ls in a Unix shell is roughly equivalent to dir under Windows, and Unix vi is similar to Windows edit.

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