How do I get the current mercurial revision without calling hg?

Question

In Git the current revision hash is stored in

.git/refs/heads/master

Is there an equivalent in Mercurial that doesn't require me making a call to hg log -l1? I know I can get the current branch in .hg/branch.

This is to "display" the current hg hash on screen when browsing a web page.

Answer 1

$ hg parents --template="{node}\n"
52b8cee1e59c91b9147635b7f44a3a8896ee0b00

$ hexdump -n 20 -e '1/1 "%02x"' .hg/dirstate
52b8cee1e59c91b9147635b7f44a3a8896ee0b00

But why can't you just call hg parents --template="{node}\n"?