Close multiple branches in TortoiseHg

I use TortoiseHg 1.1 and in our team we tend to create named branches for each case we work on then merge with default when we're done. Unfortunately most of the named branches don't get closed. This isn't a huge problem but it's annoying when you try and filter by the branch you are currently working on and there is a massive list of old branches to search through.

So is there an easy way in TortoiseHg or from the command line to close multiple branches quickly without having to manually commit and close on each branch?

Unfortunately no.

You need to close each branch separately with its own commit on that branch.

The best way to do that is to use the command line, you could even create a simple batch file to close a bunch of them:

for %%f in (branch1 branch2 branch4) do (
    hg up "%%f"
    if exitcode 1 goto quit
    hg commit --close-branch -m "closing branch %%f"
    if exitcode 1 goto quit
)
:quit

The workflow I use is to use the bookmarks extension to keep only local bookmarks for my lines of development, this way I use normal unnamed branches in Mercurial, but can still easily tell them apart locally. The commit messages are used to separate them later.

This way I don't have a bunch of named branches cluttering up my history, I don't have to remember to close them, and I only have to keep track of the branches I use locally.

See the following for all the possible options:

• https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/PruningDeadBranches

of which the closing branch option can be used.

hg up -C badbranch
hg commit --close-branch -m 'close badbranch, this approach never worked'
hg up -C default # switch back to "good" branch

Also, my understanding has been that it is preferable to clone for most work and use named branches only for few possible long lived trains of development.

Here is a powershell script that will close all active branches except the default. Add your own filtering logic to exclude branches you don't want to close.

$branches = hg branches -a | sort
$exclude = "default" 

foreach ($item in $branches)
{
 $branch = $item.Split([string[]]  " ", [StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries)[0]

 if(!$exclude.Contains($branch))
 {
    hg update $branch
    hg commit --close-branch -m "closing old branch"
    hg status
    Write-Host $branch 
 }
}

hg push

Okay so this is way late, but I set out to do this via bash and after a lot of pain I got a working solution. Take note that this does not do an hg push at the end, because I wanted to look over the results in tortoise before pushing.

#Protected branches to not close
develop='develop'
default='default'

IFS=$'\n'

#Get all branches
allBranches=$( hg branches | sort )

#Loop over and close old branches
for item in $allBranches
do

#Trim off everything but the branch name
branch=$( echo $item | sed -r 's/\s*[0-9]+:[0-9a-f]+(\s\(inactive\))?$//' )

if [ $branch != $develop ] && [ $branch != $default ]
then

hg update $branch
hg commit --close-branch -m "Closing old branch"

fi

done

After running the script I asked the team which branches they were actively working on and stripped those closure commits.