Re: Unquoted file name in an error message

On 2025-Apr-07, Kyotaro Horiguchi wrote:

> Hello.
>
> While translating error messages related to pg_dumpall (1495eff7bdb),
> I noticed that one message lacks double quotes around the file name:
>
> could not open map file: %s
>
> Since this placeholder appears standalone and not embedded in a
> sentence, I initially thought it might fall outside the usual
> convention of quoting file names.

Hello, I think the problem here is that the %s is not the file name, but
the string from strerror. So the lack of quotes there would seem to be
correct. The real problem is that the file name isn't mentioned in the
error message. A secondary issue might be that instead of using %s for
strerror(), maybe they should be using %m.

> + pg_fatal("could not open global.dat file: \"%s\"", strerror(errno));

Maybe we should do something like

pg_fatal("could not open "%s" file: %m", map_file_path);

--
Álvaro Herrera PostgreSQL Developer — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/