Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> On 2023-02-01 12:08:24 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
>> I like the idea of not relying on system(). In most respects, doing
>> fork() + exec() ourselves seems superior. We can control where the
>> output goes, what we do while waiting, etc. But system() runs the
>> command through the shell, so that for example you don't have to
>> invent your own way of splitting a string into words to be passed to
>> exec[whatever](). I've never understood how you're supposed to get
>> that behavior other than by calling system().
> We could just exec the shell in the forked process, using -c to invoke
> the command. That should give us pretty much the same efficiency as
> system(), with a lot more control.
The main thing that system() brings to the table is platform-specific
knowledge of where the shell is. I'm not very sure that we want to
wire in "/bin/sh".
regards, tom lane