Re: v12 and pg_restore -f-

[ redirecting to -hackers ]

Justin Pryzby <pryzby(at)telsasoft(dot)com> writes:
> I saw this and updated our scripts with pg_restore -f-

> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/release-12.html
> |In pg_restore, require specification of -f - to send the dump contents to standard output (Euler Taveira)
> |Previously, this happened by default if no destination was specified, but that was deemed to be unfriendly.

> What I didn't realize at first is that -f- has no special meaning in v11 - it
> just writes a file called ./-

Ugh. I didn't realize that either, or I would have made a stink about
this patch. Reducing the risk of getting a dump spewed at you is
completely not worth the cost of making it impossible to have
cross-version-compatible scripting of pg_restore.

Perhaps we could change the back branches so that they interpret "-f -"
as "write to stdout", but without enforcing that you use that syntax.
Nobody is going to wish that to mean "write to a file named '-'", so
I don't think this would be an unacceptable change.

Alternatively, we could revert the v12 behavior change. On the whole
that might be the wiser course. I do not think the costs and benefits
of this change were all that carefully thought through.

regards, tom lane