Force Mercurial (Hg) to add new files automatically

Question

I'm looking for the opposite mechanism to the .ignore file, which should add all files of a given pattern automatically, for example *.tex for any LaTeX documentation project or *.def for any file that was added by OASIS (an MS Access addin for version control).

Answer 1

hg add with no arguments will add all files not explicitly ignored. You can also use hg commit --addremove to add all unknown files (and remove all deleted files, i.e. hg rm any which hg status lists as '!') to do this automatically when committing.

Answer 2

Adding files only happens when you run hg add. If you want to add all files matching a pattern, use the --include (-I) switch.