How do I make mercurial generate a list of files that will be affected by a merge?

Question

I'm using Mercurial and I'm trying to merge changes into my main repo. Some of those files in my main repo are write-protected. This makes the hg merge command fail with an abort: Access is denied.

I want to make those files which will be affected by the merge writable, and only those files (not the whole repo). Is there a way to make Mercurial print out a list of just those files which need to be resolved?

(PS. They're writable because they're controlled by Perforce. The reasons for this screwy setup are too dumb to relate here.)

Answer 1

I don't know of any built-in way to do this easily... it's not a very common need. An extension could almost certainly be written to add a --dry-run option to hg merge much like hg revert's --dry-run option.

If you just want something quick and dirty, maybe something like this would work?

hg merge -Pv | grep files | sed -e's/files:\s*//' -e's/\s/\n/g' | sort | uniq

That assumes you don't have any files with spaces in their names or anything else completely reasonable like that...