Re: pg_ctl only allows 12 parameters?

Ron Johnson <ronljohnsonjr(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Mon, Dec 18, 2023 at 11:09 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> So, what's the platform? And are you quite sure your psql is v14?

> $ psql -V
> psql (PostgreSQL) 14.10
> $ postgres -V
> postgres (PostgreSQL) 14.10
> $ cat /etc/redhat-release
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.9 (Ootpa)
> # This is a "SLES Expanded Support platform 8.9"
> # The above "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server" string is only used to
> # keep software compatibility.

Hmph. I'm on (genuine) RHEL 8.9, and when I tried the command you
showed it seemed to work fine. So there's some important detail
you've not provided. Now I'm wondering about things like invisible
characters and whether you managed to type something that looks like
a "-" but is really some weird unicode character.

Looking at the v14 pg_ctl code, I see it has an extra level of
looping around getopt_long to try to cope with implementations
that don't permute the arguments. So in theory it should work as
documented everywhere. But I could see how things might get
confused, if the subroutine misidentifies what is a switch.

regards, tom lane