Cannot clone Mercurial repo - abort: repository http://hg.something.com/something error

Question

I ran this command to clone my repo

[19:07:19 root /data]$  hg clone http://hg.something.com/something dir
abort: repository http://hg.something.com/something not found!
[19:07:19 root /data]$

I am not sure why hg says it cannot find the repo when I can access the repo http://hg.something.com/something from my web browser. Also the same command works from my colleague's machine. And ping hg.something.com works fine. One more thing is I have the same repo cloned using the same command in the same directory a few days back. hg is totally operational inside that directory.

Any hint what may be causing this problem?

PS : I can't use SSH. I have to stick to http.

Answer 1

I found the peculiar problem. I had copied the repo link from a web browser that looked like this-

If you see there is a small character ( red circle ) that indicates that the repo is a link. When I copied the whole command, this character also got copied. But when I pasted this command into my linux terminal, it turned into an invisible character and as such I could never spot it but mercurial could.

When I pasted the whole command into vim, it showed up the "invisible" character like this-

hg clone <200b>http://hg.something.com/fs

So that invisible character was the zero width space .

Quite an insidious bug though!