Shell function for cloning Mercurial repositories

One of the things that I find myself needing to do often is clone a repository from our mercurial server. All of our repositories are under a directory on the server that is accessibel through ssh, so I wanted to be able to type in a command on the command line with the name of the remote reposirotry and, optionally, the name of the local clone. If I leave out the second argument, it creates a local clone with the same name.

So I wrote a small function that I put in my .profile (you can add it to your .bash_rc, .bash_profile or whatever gets loaded when you start a new terminal session) The function loooks like this:

function hgclone() { hg clone ssh://user@mercurial.server.com/repos/$1 $2; }

This allows me to type in the command:

$ hgclone repository [localclone]

rather than having to remeber and type in the full path to the remote repository.