Re: Correct handling of blank/commented lines in PSQL interactive-mode history

On Mon, 2021-09-06 at 07:50 -0700, David G. Johnston wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 6, 2021 at 7:13 AM Greg Nancarrow <gregn4422@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've attached a patch that corrects the behaviour.
> > For the type of lines mentioned, the patch makes the history behave
> > more like Bash history.
> 
> I have my doubts that you've really fixed anything here since Bash is a
> line-oriented shell while psql is a statement-oriented one.  This is a feature.
> What you are observing is, I think, a side-effect of that fact that
> comments cannot terminate statements.  That seems reasonable.
> In short, your BEFORE results make sense and don't require fixing.

I think that psql's behavior should be governed more by usefulness than
by consideratoins like "comments cannot terminate statements".

I agree with Greg that the current behavior is annoying and would
welcome the change.  This has bothered me before.

That multi-line statements that contain a line with a space are omitted
from the history when HISTCONTROL is set to "ignorespace" seems like
a bug to me.

So +1 on the idea of the patch, although I didn't scrutinize the
implementation.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe