How can I remove the working copy from a Mercurial clone?
When cloning a repository with mercurial you can pass the -U/--noupdate flag to create a clone with no working copy. Can I remove the working copy if I forget to pass this flag at clone time? And if so, how?
This is conceptually similar to this git question, but for mercurial.
Answer
Documentation at Mercurial wiki says following about bare repositories:
"Although this is a minor issue, Mercurial can obviously handle a bare repository; that is, a repository without a working copy. In Git you need a configuration option for that, whereas in Hg you only need to check out the null revision, like this:"
hg update null
The null revision is similar to the empty state you have when you have just done hg init. It is the parent of revision 0 (and the second parent of all non-merge revisions) and by updating back to it you again get an empty working copy.
The link may look ironic: