Re: Use of 'cp -r' in CREATE DATABASE

Nigel J. Andrews said:
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 06:36:05PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> > Our dbcommands.c has for create database:
>> >
>> >     snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "cp -r '%s' '%s'", src_loc,
>> >     target_dir);
>> >
>> [...]
>> >
>> > I think we should switch to -R in our code.
>>
>> But you will have to write special code for Win32, won't you?
>> Maybe it would be better to avoid using system commands
>> altogether and copy the whole thing using syscalls ...
>
> That was my immediate thought. Unfortunately that means reinventing the
> wheel; or grabbing it from BSD or somewhere and distributing it with
> postgresql.
>

We need a consistent policy about it, I think. I grabbed some code for a
recursive mkdir from NetBSD, and it is in initdb.c. But I also wrote a
recursive rm, and Bruce replaced it with calls to the native utilities
using system(), for understandable reasons. Maybe we need a small,
portable, utility library. Or maybe just relying on system utilities is
acceptable.

cheers

andrew