So I do a lot of work on a school computer. We can't install anything but we have most of our tools on our flash drives but I was wondering if there's a way to get Command Prompt to use Mercurial off of my Flash Drive. Let's say in theory that Mercurial's files were on my flash drive, where would I go from there?
Asked
Active
Viewed 8,469 times
3 Answers
26
To make Bryan's solution "truly" portable in Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7, assuming the BAT file is inside Mercurial's directory, use:
set PATH=%PATH%;%~dp0%
So, no more hardcoded paths.

user245794
- 261
- 2
- 2
-
Ya, we noticed the previous code was kind of un-portable but we fixed it. The code here looks different from ours though, what exactly does %~dp0% do/stand for? – NessDan Jan 08 '10 at 21:08
-
2The above's pretty good, actually. That crazy %~dp0% basically evaluates to the path of the currently running bat file – rossipedia May 17 '10 at 23:15
25
Say your flash drive was drive G: and your Mercurial executables are in G:\mercurial
Open a command prompt and enter:
set PATH=%PATH%;G:\mercurial
Proceed to use hg
as normal
This should work, in theory. If you're on a *nix computer, you would do something like this (given /media/FLASHDRIVE is the path to your flash drive):
export PATH=$PATH:/media/FLASHDRIVE/mercurial
Hope that helps!
EDIT
In response to the comment below:
@ECHO OFF
REM Mercurial enabler :)
set PATH=%PATH%;G:\mercurial
cmd.exe
Should do it :)

rossipedia
- 56,800
- 10
- 90
- 93
-
That worked! Thanks but got another question! Is there any way to incorporate that into a .bat file so I'd just open that and have it open command prompt and run that at the same time? – NessDan Dec 15 '09 at 00:45
-
You sir, are an instant winrar. Thank you and I greatly appreciate it! – NessDan Dec 15 '09 at 01:18
23
download the tortoise hg .msi setup
msiexec /a tortoisehg-1.1.4-hg-1.6.4-x64.msi /qb TARGETDIR=f:\hg-temp
it will extract the tortise hg files to f:\hg-temp path,
goto f:\hg-temp\PFiles\TortoiseHg and copy it to F:\hg
Delete f:\hg-temp\PFiles\TortoiseHg
Then add f:\hg to your path
set PATH=%PATH%;f:\hg
(f:\ is your flash drive)

prabir
- 7,674
- 4
- 31
- 43
-
3I still use this method to produce a portable tortoisehg. One thing I would add is that if you don't have administrative rights, you can "advertise" the product to yourself, allowing you to unpack it. Just run `msiexec /ju tortoisehg-(version).msi` prior to the above. – icabod Sep 06 '11 at 09:22