Re: Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Make initdb's suggested "pg_ctl start" command line more reliabl

Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 8/20/16 3:05 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Make initdb's suggested "pg_ctl start" command line more reliable.

> A couple of problems with this:

> The not-quoting-if-not-needed doesn't appear to do anything useful for me:
> 'pg-install/bin/pg_ctl' -D 'pg-install/var/data' -l logfile start

Dash is considered a character that needs quoting. It might be possible
to avoid that if we could be certain that appendShellString's output would
never be placed in a spot where it could be taken for a switch, but that
seems like a large assumption to me. Or maybe we could treat it as
forcing quotes only if it starts the string; but I don't personally care
enough to write the code for that. Feel free if you want to.

> The indentation of that line was changed from 4 to 10. I don't think
> that was a good change.

Hmm, not intentional ... [ looks closely... ] Looks like a tab got in
there somehow. Will fix.

> As just mentioned elsewhere, this accidentally introduces a failure if
> the PostgreSQL installation path contains LF/CR, because of the use of
> appendShellString().

I think that's intentional, not accidental. What actual use case is
there for allowing such paths?

regards, tom lane