Question

How can ask Mercurial to warn me before I add files which would otherwise be ignored?

For example, something like:

$ hg add foo.o
warning: adding ignored file foo.o

There seems to have been a patch submitted to the mailing list: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2008-February/004993.html

But I can’t find any further references to it.

Answer 1

It’s sort of a hacky workaround and only half what you want, but you could replace

$ hg add foo.o

with

$ hg add -I foo.o

That says “add everything but only if it’s not ignored and it matches the pattern after -I“.

An example:

$ ls -A
.hg  .hgignore  this
$ cat .hgignore 
this
$ hg stat --all
? .hgignore
I this
$ hg add -I this
$ hg stat --all
? .hgignore
I this

So you can see that “this” wasn’t added and is still in ignored state. Of course, that’s not a warning, it’s a refusal.