Unpack HG bundle with PowerShell

Recently I needed to strip three HG changesets, that had not yet left my local repo, but wanted to extract some of the code within those changesets for something I needed. As I’m sure I would find myself needing this again, I figured I would archive it here for myself.

The Mercurial Wiki discusses how to manually unpack a changeset bundle created by hg strip. It even gives a simple code example on how to unpack the bundle using python. The hg strip command produces bundles that are compressed with BZip2. The PowerShell version of this is quite simple, however there is no native BZip2 support in PowerShell so I left that portion to the all trusty 7-Zip.

# Read the compressessed bundle in, reading all at once
# versus line-by-line (i.e. ReadCount set to 0)
$bundle = ".\.hg\strip-backup\551b9da1b6ed-backup.hg"
$hgBzip = Get-Content -ReadCount 0 -Encoding Byte -Path $bundle

# Strip the 6 byte header off the front, put back the 2 byte 'BZ' and save to temp file.
$bzOutFile = Join-Path ([System.IO.Path]::GetTempPath()) "$((get-item $bundle).BaseName).bz2"
$bzHeader = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes("BZ")
$bzHeader + ($hgBzip | select -Last ($hgBzip.Length - 6)) | Set-Content -Encoding Byte $bzOutFile

# Uncompress using 7Z to current directory (change output dir with -o switch)
7z.exe x $bzOutFile
rm $bzOutFile

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