Re: Improving psql's \password command

"Bossart, Nathan" <bossartn(at)amazon(dot)com> writes:
> On 10/29/21, 12:47 PM, "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> While testing that, I noticed another bit of user-unfriendliness:
>> there's no obvious way to get out of it if you realize you are
>> setting the wrong user's password. simple_prompt() ignores
>> control-C, and when you give up and press return, you'll just
>> get the prompt to enter the password again.

> Well, as of bf6b9e9, "ALTER ROLE nathan PASSWORD ''" is effectively
> the same as "ALTER ROLE nathan PASSWORD NULL". I agree about the
> user-unfriendliness, but maybe simple_prompt() ignoring control-C is
> the root-cause of the user-unfriendliness.

I was afraid somebody would say that. I have looked at it, but AFAICS
we'd have to duplicate all of sprompt.c and nearly all of pg_get_line.c
in order to tie it into psql's SIGINT infrastructure, since we wouldn't
dare enable the signal handler except during the innermost fgets() call,
and if we did get a signal we'd still need to clean up the terminal echo
state, so we couldn't just longjmp out of simple_prompt(). The
cost/benefit ratio of that doesn't look very good.

(Note that most callers of simple_prompt() don't need to sweat over
this because they haven't moved SIGINT handling off the default:
they're OK with just terminating on control-C.)

regards, tom lane