Re: pg_restore ignores PGDATABASE

On 02/19/2012 08:02 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 1:18 AM, Erik Rijkers<er(at)xs4all(dot)nl> wrote:
>> On Sun, February 19, 2012 06:27, Robert Haas wrote:
>>> On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Erik Rijkers<er(at)xs4all(dot)nl> wrote:
>>>> pg_restore ignores environment variable PGDATABASE.
>>> What exactly do you mean by "ignores"? pg_restore prints results to
>>> standard output unless a database name is specified. AFAIK, there's
>>> no syntax to say "I want a direct-to-database restore to whatever you
>>> think the default database is".
>> That's right, and that seems contradictory with:
>>
>> "This utility [pg_restore], like most other PostgreSQL utilities, also uses the environment
>> variables supported by libpq (see Section 31.13)."
>>
>> as pg_restore does 'ignore' (for want of a better word) PGDATABASE.
>>
>> But I think I can conclude from your reply that that behaviour is indeed intentional.
> It is, because we want there to be a way of converting a custom or tar
> format archive back to text. I think that probably works out for the
> best anyway, since pg_restore is a sufficiently dangerous operation
> that you want to be darn sure you're not doing it on the wrong
> database. dropdb also requires a database name, while createdb does
> not, for similar reasons...

Right, I think we probably need to adjust the docs slightly to match
this reality.

cheers

andrew