Hello,
Is this just kind of a bug fix? Beforehand the documentation says "\g fn"
sends to file, but that was not happening with COPY, and now it does as it
says?
Yes. [...]
It does not add "unless the query is a COPY", so it seems right
to make that just work, and call it a bug fix.
Does this suggest backpatching?
However, it does not contain any tests (bad:-)
Testing this requires at least some interaction with the OS which I'm
uncomfortable to add.
Hmmm. This means that "\g filename" goes fully untested:-( A casual grep
seems to confirm this. Sigh:-(
There is a precedent in regress/sql/hs_standby_allowed.sql doing:
COPY hs1 TO '/tmp/copy_test'
\! cat /tmp/copy_test
Indeed. I'm unsure windows has cat or /tmp, so I do not understand how it
works on such platform. Maybe I'm missing something.
We could add something like that in psql.sql, but I'm not fond of it
because it assumes a Unix-ish environment,
Yep.
I'm open to ideas on a portable way for psql.sql to test \g writing to a
file or a program, but ATM my inclination is to not add that test.
A relative file could be ok? After some testing, the standard regression
tests do not cd to some special place, so it may fail?
However TAP tests do that, and I have used this extensively with pgbench,
so a psql TAP test could do that and other things, such as importing a csv
file or whatever.
nor documentation (hmmm... maybe none needed, though).
\copy has this paragraph:
"The syntax of this command is similar to that of the SQL COPY
command. All options other than the data source/destination are as
specified for COPY. Because of this, special parsing rules apply to
the \copy meta-command. Unlike most other meta-commands, the entire
remainder of the line is always taken to be the arguments of \copy,
and neither variable interpolation nor backquote expansion are
performed in the arguments".
We could add that COPY TO STDOUT with a redirection might be used as an
alternative. The downside is that with four paragraphs plus one tip,
the explanations on \copy give already a lot to chew on, so is it
worth to add more?
I'd say that a small paragraph with the tip would be ok.
--
Fabien.
