Mercurial: multiline commit message on the command line?

Question

How can I specify a multiline commit message for mercurial on the command line?

hg commit -m \"* add foo\\n* fix bar\"

does not work. The log

Answer 1

Mercurial: multiline commit message on the command line?

Hit enter.

$ hg commit -m "Did some work
> Now I'm done"

One of the things is that only the first line shows up in hg log:

$ hg log
changeset:   0:d2dc019450a2
tag:         tip
user:        Aaron Maenpaa <zacherates@gmail.com>
date:        Sat Jan 24 07:46:23 2009 -0500
summary:     Did some work

... but if you fire up "hg view" you can see that the whole message is there.

Edited to add:

... but hg -v log shows the whole message:

$ hg -v log
changeset:   0:d2dc019450a2
tag:         tip
user:        Aaron Maenpaa <zacherates@gmail.com>
date:        Sat Jan 24 07:46:23 2009 -0500
files:       work
description:
Did some work
Now I'm done

Answer 2

I know, there is already a solution for linux users, but I needed another solution for windows command line, so I was looking for it...

And I found one: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial/2011-November/040855.html

hg commit -l filename.txt

I hope, it's useful for someone out there ,)

[EDIT] oO - it has already been added to the help

-l --logfile FILE read commit message from file

Answer 3

In bash (since version 2.0):

hg commit -m $'foo\nbar'

(I.e. put a dollar sign before an opening single quote to make it parse escape sequences (like \n) within the string — note that it doesn't work with double quotes.)

Answer 4

If you're doing it interactively (vs. from a script), just do hg commit without the -m flag. I'm not sure what the behavior is on Linux or Mac, but on Windows it pops up Notepad with a file that you fill out and save for a multiline message.

Answer 5

Here's another way that is more close to what you tried at first:

hg commit -m "$(echo -e 'foo\nbar')"

Answer 6

For Windows with PowerShell:

 hg commit --message "foo`nbar"