If the PAGER environment variable is set but contains an empty string,
psql would pass it to "sh" which would silently exit, causing whatever
query output we were printing to vanish entirely. This is quite
mystifying; it took a long time for us to figure out that this was the
cause of Joseph Brenner's trouble report. Rather than allowing that
to happen, we should treat this as another way to specify "no pager".
(We could alternatively treat it as selecting the default pager, but
it seems more likely that the former is what the user meant to achieve
by setting PAGER this way.)
Nonempty, but all-white-space, PAGER values have the same behavior, and
it's pretty easy to test for that, so let's handle that case the same way.
Most other cases of faulty PAGER values will result in the shell printing
some kind of complaint to stderr, which should be enough to diagnose the
problem, so we don't need to work harder than this. (Note that there's
been an intentional decision not to be very chatty about apparent failure
returns from the pager process, since that may happen if, eg, the user
quits the pager with control-C or some such. I'd just as soon not start
splitting hairs about which exit codes might merit making our own report.)
libpq's old PQprint() function was already on board with ignoring empty
PAGER values, but for consistency, make it ignore all-white-space values
as well.
It's been like this a long time, so back-patch to all supported branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFfgvXWLOE2novHzYjmQK8-J6TmHz42G8f3X0SORM44+stUGmw@mail.gmail.com
The decision to reuse values of parameters from a previous connection
has been based on whether the new target is a conninfo string. Add this
means of overriding that default. This feature arose as one component
of a fix for security vulnerabilities in pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and
pg_upgrade, so back-patch to 9.1 (all supported versions). In 9.3 and
later, comment paragraphs that required update had already-incorrect
claims about behavior when no connection is open; fix those problems.
Security: CVE-2016-5424
Dilian Palauzov pointed out in bug #14201 that the docs failed to mention
the possibility of %R producing '(' due to an unmatched parenthesis.
He proposed just adding that in the same style as the other options were
listed; but it seemed to me that the sentence was already nearly
unintelligible, so I rewrote it a bit more extensively.
Report: <20160619121113.5789.68274@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
This has worked that way for a long time, maybe always, but you would
not have known it from the documentation. Also back-patch the notes
I added to HEAD earlier today about behavior of the "-f -" switch,
which likewise have been valid for many releases.
psql was already accepting conninfo strings as the first parameter in
\connect, but the way it worked wasn't sane; some of the other
parameters would get the previous connection's values, causing it to
connect to a completely unexpected server or, more likely, not finding
any server at all because of completely wrong combinations of
parameters.
Fix by explicitely checking for a conninfo-looking parameter in the
dbname position; if one is found, use its complete specification rather
than mix with the other arguments. Also, change tab-completion to not
try to complete conninfo/URI-looking "dbnames" and document that
conninfos are accepted as first argument.
There was a weak consensus to backpatch this, because while the behavior
of using the dbname as a conninfo is nowhere documented for \connect, it
is reasonable to expect that it works because it does work in many other
contexts. Therefore this is backpatched all the way back to 9.0.
To implement this, routines previously private to libpq have been
duplicated so that psql can decide what looks like a conninfo/URI
string. In back branches, just duplicate the same code all the way back
to 9.2, where URIs where introduced; 9.0 and 9.1 have a simpler version.
In master, the routines are moved to src/common and renamed.
Author: David Fetter, Andrew Dunstan. Some editorialization by me
(probably earning a Gierth's "Sloppy" badge in the process.)
Reviewers: Andrew Gierth, Erik Rijkers, Pavel Stěhule, Stephen Frost,
Robert Haas, Andrew Dunstan.
"ECHO all" is ignored for interactive input, and has been for a very long
time, though possibly not for as long as the documentation has claimed the
opposite. Fix that, and also note that empty lines aren't echoed, which
while dubious is another longstanding behavior (it's embedded in our
regression test files for one thing). Per bug #12721 from Hans Ginzel.
In HEAD, also improve the code comments in this area, and suppress an
unnecessary fflush(stdout) when we're not echoing. That would likely
be safe to back-patch, but I'll not risk it mere hours before a release
wrap.
For simple boolean variables such as ON_ERROR_STOP, psql has for a long
time recognized variant spellings of "on" and "off" (such as "1"/"0"),
and it also made a point of warning you if you'd misspelled the setting.
But these conveniences did not exist for other keyword-valued variables.
In particular, though ECHO_HIDDEN and ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK include "on" and
"off" as possible values, none of the alternative spellings for those were
recognized; and to make matters worse the code would just silently assume
"on" was meant for any unrecognized spelling. Several people have reported
getting bitten by this, so let's fix it. In detail, this patch:
* Allows all spellings recognized by ParseVariableBool() for ECHO_HIDDEN
and ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK.
* Reports a warning for unrecognized values for COMP_KEYWORD_CASE, ECHO,
ECHO_HIDDEN, HISTCONTROL, ON_ERROR_ROLLBACK, and VERBOSITY.
* Recognizes all values for all these variables case-insensitively;
previously there was a mishmash of case-sensitive and case-insensitive
behaviors.
Back-patch to all supported branches. There is a small risk of breaking
existing scripts that were accidentally failing to malfunction; but the
consensus is that the chance of detecting real problems and preventing
future mistakes outweighs this.
Document the long forms of \H \i \ir \o \p \r \w ... apparently, we have
a long and dishonorable history of leaving out the unabbreviated names of
psql backslash commands.
Avoid saying "Unix shell"; we can just say "shell" with equal clarity,
and not leave Windows users wondering whether the feature works for them.
Improve consistency of documentation of \g \o \w metacommands. There's
no reason to use slightly different wording or markup for each one.
psql's \s (print command history) doesn't work at all with recent libedit
versions when printing to the terminal, because libedit tries to do an
fchmod() on the target file which will fail if the target is /dev/tty.
(We'd already noted this in the context of the target being /dev/null.)
Even before that, it didn't work pleasantly, because libedit likes to
encode the command history file (to ensure successful reloading), which
renders it nigh unreadable, not to mention significantly different-looking
depending on exactly which libedit version you have. So let's forget using
write_history() for this purpose, and instead print the data ourselves,
using logic similar to that used to iterate over the history for newline
encoding/decoding purposes.
While we're at it, insert the ability to use the pager when \s is printing
to the terminal. This has been an acknowledged shortcoming of \s for many
years, so while you could argue it's not exactly a back-patchable bug fix
it still seems like a good improvement. Anyone who's seriously annoyed
at this can use "\s /dev/tty" or local equivalent to get the old behavior.
Experimentation with this showed that the history iteration logic was
actually rather broken when used with libedit. It turns out that with
libedit you have to use previous_history() not next_history() to advance
to more recent history entries. The easiest and most robust fix for this
seems to be to make a run-time test to verify which function to call.
We had not noticed this because libedit doesn't really need the newline
encoding logic: its own encoding ensures that command entries containing
newlines are reloaded correctly (unlike libreadline). So the effective
behavior with recent libedits was that only the oldest history entry got
newline-encoded or newline-decoded. However, because of yet other bugs in
history_set_pos(), some old versions of libedit allowed the existing loop
logic to reach entries besides the oldest, which means there may be libedit
~/.psql_history files out there containing encoded newlines in more than
just the oldest entry. To ensure we can reload such files, it seems
appropriate to back-patch this fix, even though that will result in some
incompatibility with older psql versions (ie, multiline history entries
written by a psql with this fix will look corrupted to a psql without it,
if its libedit is reasonably up to date).
Stepan Rutz and Tom Lane
The documentation suggested using "echo | psql", but not the often-superior
alternative of a here-document. Also, be more direct about suggesting
that people avoid -c for multiple commands. Per discussion.
Primarily, explain where to find the system-wide psqlrc file, per recent
gripe from John Sutton. Do some general wordsmithing and improve the
markup, too.
Also adjust psqlrc.sample so its comments about file location are somewhat
trustworthy. (Not sure why we bother with this file when it's empty,
but whatever.)
Back-patch to 9.2 where the startup file naming scheme was last changed.
This adds the variable COMP_KEYWORD_CASE, which controls in what case
keywords are completed. This is partially to let users configure the
change from commit 69f4f1c357, but it
also offers more behaviors than were available before.
The default for the choice attribute of the <arg> element is "opt",
which would normally put the argument inside brackets. But the DSSSL
stylesheets contain a hack that treats <arg> directly inside <group>
specially, so that <group><arg>-x</arg><arg>-y</arg></group> comes out
as [ -x | -y ] rather than [ [-x] | [-y] ], which it would technically
be. But when building man pages, this doesn't work, and so the
command synopses on the man pages contain lots of extra brackets.
By putting choice="opt" or choice="plain" explicitly on every <arg>
and <group> element, we avoid any toolchain dependencies like that,
and it also makes it clearer in the source code what is meant.
In passing, make some small corrections in the documentation about
which arguments are really optional or not.
postgres:// URIs are an attempt to "stop the bleeding" in this general
area that has been said to occur due to external projects adopting their
own syntaxes. The syntaxes supported by this patch:
postgres://[user[:pwd]@][unix-socket][:port[/dbname]][?param1=value1&...]
postgres://[user[:pwd]@][net-location][:port][/dbname][?param1=value1&...]
should be enough to cover most interesting cases without having to
resort to "param=value" pairs, but those are provided for the cases that
need them regardless.
libpq documentation has been shuffled around a bit, to avoid stuffing
all the format details into the PQconnectdbParams description, which was
already a bit overwhelming. The list of keywords has moved to its own
subsection, and the details on the URI format live in another subsection.
This includes a simple test program, as requested in discussion, to
ensure that interesting corner cases continue to work appropriately in
the future.
Author: Alexander Shulgin
Some tweaking by Álvaro Herrera, Greg Smith, Daniel Farina, Peter Eisentraut
Reviewed by Robert Haas, Alexey Klyukin (offlist), Heikki Linnakangas,
Marko Kreen, and others
Oh, it also supports postgresql:// but that's probably just an accident.
Per a suggestion from Euler Taveira, it seems like a good idea to include
this information in \du (and \dg) output. This costs nothing for people
who are not using the VALID UNTIL feature, while for those who are, it's
rather critical information.
Fabrízio de Royes Mello
Add new psql settings and command-line options to support setting the
field and record separators for unaligned output to a zero byte, for
easier interfacing with other shell tools.
reviewed by Abhijit Menon-Sen
This adds support for the more or less SQL-conforming USAGE privilege
on types and domains. The intent is to be able restrict which users
can create dependencies on types, which restricts the way in which
owners can alter types.
reviewed by Yeb Havinga
This can be used to set (or unset) environment variables that will
affect programs called by psql (such as the PAGER), probably most
usefully in a .psqlrc file.
Andrew Dunstan, reviewed by Josh Kupershmidt.
This adds the "auto" option to the \x command, which switches to the
expanded mode when the normal output would be wider than the screen.
reviewed by Noah Misch
The documentation neglected to explain its behavior in a script file
(it only ends execution of the script, not psql as a whole), and failed
to mention the long form \quit either.
These changes allow backtick command evaluation and psql variable
interpolation to happen on substrings of a single meta-command argument.
Formerly, no such evaluations happened at all if the backtick or colon
wasn't the first character of the argument, and we considered an argument
completed as soon as we'd processed one backtick, variable reference, or
quoted substring. A string like 'FOO'BAR was thus taken as two arguments
not one, not exactly what one would expect. In the new coding, an argument
is considered terminated only by unquoted whitespace or backslash.
Also, clean up a bunch of omissions, infelicities and outright errors in
the psql documentation of variables and metacommand argument syntax.
Instead of displaying comments on an arbitrary subset of the object
types which support them, make \dd display comments on exactly those
object types which don't have their own backlash commands. We now
regard the display of comments as properly the job of the relevant
backslash command (though many of them do so only in verbose mode)
rather than something that \dd should be responsible for. However,
a handful of object types have no backlash command, so make \dd
give information about those.
Josh Kupershmidt
The relevant backslash commands already exist, so we're just adding an
additional column. With this commit, all objects that have psql backslash
commands and accept comments should now display those comments at least
in verbose mode.
Josh Kupershmidt, with doc additions by me.
\dc and \dD now accept a "+" option, which will cause the comments to
be displayed. Along the way, correct a few oversights in the previous
commit in this area, 3b17efdfdd - namely,
(1) when \dL+ is used, make description still be the last column, for
consistency with what we've done elsewhere; and (2) document the
difference between \dC and \dC+.
Josh Kupershmidt, with a couple of doc changes by me.
There is what may actually be a mistake in our markup. The problem is
in a situation like
<para>
<command>FOO</command> is ...
there is strictly speaking a line break before "FOO". In the HTML
output, this does not appear to be a problem, but in the man page
output, this shows up, so you get double blank lines at odd places.
So far, we have attempted to work around this with an XSL hack, but
that causes other problems, such as creating run-ins in places like
<acronym>SQL</acronym> <command>COPY</command>
So fix the problem properly by removing the extra whitespace. I only
fixed the problems that affect the man page output, not all the
places.
The output of \dL (list languages) is fairly narrow, so we just always
display the comment. \dC (list casts) can get fairly wide, so we only
display comments if the new \dC+ option is specified.
Josh Kupershmidt
Also change "switch" to "arg" because "switch" is a bit of a sloppy
term. So the environment variable is called
PSQL_EDITOR_LINENUMBER_ARG. Set "+" as hardcoded default value on
Unix (since "vi" is the hardcoded default editor), so many users won't
have to configure this at all. Move the documentation around a bit to
centralize the editor configuration under environment variables,
rather than repeating bits of it under every backslash command that
invokes an editor.
\ir is short for "include relative"; when used from a script, the
supplied pathname will be interpreted relative to the input file,
rather than to the current working directory.
Gurjeet Singh, reviewed by Josh Kupershmidt, with substantial further
cleanup by me.
"Unusable" collations are those not matching the current database's
encoding. The former behavior inconsistently showed such collations
some of the time, depending on the details of the pattern argument.
