Re: [HACKERS] New pg_ctl has retrogressed in error messages

Tom Lane wrote:

>Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>
>
>>I also changed all the pid variables to use pid_t.
>>
>>
>
>Good, but ...
>
>
>
>>! fscanf(pidf, "%u", &pid);
>>
>>
>
>this code will fail rather horribly if sizeof(pid_t) != sizeof(int).
>Even more to the point, I believe a standalone backend will put
>the negative of its PID into the file, and the revised code will fail
>to parse that at all.
>
>I think the safest code would be like
>
> long tmp;
>
> fscanf(pidf, "%ld", &tmp);
> if (tmp < 0)
> {
> tmp = -tmp;
> // do anything else needed for backend case
> }
> pid = (pid_t) tmp;
>
>
>
>

I deliberately used a signed long for these reasons in the first place.

The number of places we actually need to use this value as a pid is
small (3 by my count - in calls to kill() ), and it was cast there to
pid_t, I think. I still don't see what's wrong with that.

cheers

andrew