• Tom Lane's avatar
    Handle empty or all-blank PAGER setting more sanely in psql. · 18f8f784
    Tom Lane authored
    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
    18f8f784
print.c 80.9 KB