Find deleted files in Mercurial repository history, quickly?

Question

You can use hg grep, but it searches the contents of all files.

What if I just want to search the file names of deleted files to recover one?

I tried hg grep -I <file-name-pattern> <pattern> but this seems to return no results.

Answer 1

using templates is simple:

$ hg log --template "{rev}: {file_dels}\n" 

Answer 2

Update for Mercurial 1.6

You can use revsets for this too:

hg log -r "removes('**')" 

(Edit: Note the double * - a single one detects removals from the root of the repository only.)

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Edit: As Mathieu Longtin suggests, this can be combined with the template from dfa's answer to show you which files each listed revision removes:

hg log -r "removes('**')" --template "{rev}: {file_dels}\n" 

That has the virtue (for machine-readability) of listing one revision per line, but you can make the output prettier for humans by using % to format each item in the list of deletions:

hg log -r "removes('**')" --template "{rev}:\n{file_dels % '{file}\n'}\n"