Mercurial suddenly thinks all files have changed - waiting for lock on working directory

Question

I've been using Mercurial v 1.1 for several months to version documents and other files. Yesterday it suddenly failed with the message:

waiting for lock on working directory

This happens in all projects I have under .hg control. Mercurial also thinks that all files in all projects have changed.

There is no .hg/store/lock file in the project it says it is waiting on the lock for.

The only thing that could have caused this is that Windows installed security patch on my computer overnight.

Has anyone else seen this with Mercurial?

Answer 1

I've had success by deleting that file .hg/wlock entirely if it exists, then everything is back to normal. If you are worried about losing something, just make a copy

Answer 2

For working directory, the lock is .hg/wlock. Does the file exists? For rebuilding the dirstate (beware it won't restore changes like adds/remove/renames/copies), you can use hg debugrebuildstate.