Re: Alternative to \copy in psql modelled after \g

Daniel Verite <daniel@manitou-mail.org>

From: "Daniel Verite" <daniel@manitou-mail.org>
To: "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>
Cc: "PostgreSQL Hackers" <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2018-11-09T17:23:10Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
	David G. Johnston wrote:

> POLA, for me at least, would be for \g [filename] to do exactly what
> you are describing with the \copyto feature.

I admit that if we could improve \g to handle COPY, it would be more
elegant than the current proposal adding two meta-commands.

But the copy-workflow and non-copy-workflow are different, and in
order to know which one to start, \g would need to analyze the query
to determine whether it's a COPY FROM, COPY TO or something else.
psql parses queries syntactically, but not semantically AFAIK, and I
suspect we don't want to start doing that, as it breaks a separation
of concerns.


Best regards,
-- 
Daniel Vérité
PostgreSQL-powered mailer: http://www.manitou-mail.org
Twitter: @DanielVerite


Commits

  1. Fix psql's "\g target" meta-command to work with COPY TO STDOUT.