Preserving file modification dates in mercurial
Sometimes I come back to a file I worked on and I wish I would have
checked it in. I like to pretend I did by using the file modification
date as the commit date. I just ls -l xyz and then hg commit -dWHEN
xyz. But converting the ls output into mercurial date format is
error prone; I always get it wrong and then have to hg help dates.
This is something the computer can do for me, no?
Yes: the gnu date command and hg both support RFC822 date format:
hg commit -d"`date --rfc-822 --reference=xyz`" xyz
Note the ""s around the ``s. Ah, the joys of shell quoting.