Re: archive_command vs. cp -i

Technically the documentation covers its self by saying:
"This is an example, not a recommendation, and might not work on all
platforms."
What would be nice is if the documentation could be made more useful by
providing some more complex example scripts.
What do our readers use for WAL archiving?

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 12:32 PM, Kevin Grittner <
Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> wrote:

> "Martin Münstermann"<mmuenst(at)gmx(dot)de> wrote:
>
> > while setting up a new linux postgresql server, I checked my
> > archive_command. I noticed that the usual "cp -i f1 f2 <
> > /dev/null" did NOT as expected: It did not overwrite the file
> > (PASS), but it returned zero (FAIL, should return error).
> >
> > This could be reproduced on CentOS 5.6, RHEL4, and Ubuntu 10.04.
>
> I've confirmed on SLES 10 and Ubuntu 9, too.
>
> > Should the BACKUP-ARCHIVING-WAL doc be changed?
>
> I think so. Given the wide variety of platforms on which the
> example could silently cause data loss, I *really* don't think we
> want that in our docs. Someone could blithely copy it into
> production without testing and not know they had it wrong until a
> backup failed to restore.
>
> -Kevin
>
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