The following bug has been logged online:
Bug reference: 6301
Logged by: M
Email address: sitrash@email.com
PostgreSQL version: 8.4.9
Operating system: Linux
Description: extra space in psql variable expansion
Details:
First of all, thank you for supporting a very useful product!
When psql expands a :variable into a string it appends a space to the
expansion string. For example:
psql (8.4.9)
Type "help" for help.
testdb=> \set my_home /home/crazy
testdb=> \echo :my_home/my-script.sql
/home/crazy /my-script.sql
Note the space between /home/crazy and /my-script.sql in the line above,
while there's no space after /home/crazy two lines above where my_home
variable is initialized.
This prevents use of a variable for storing the directory name where a
script to be sourced resides, as in
\i :my_dir/my-script.sql
because the expanded string contains a space between the expansion of
:my_dir and the following /my-script.sql.
I believe psql should expand the string :my_dir/my-script.sql into
/home/crazy/my-script.sql (note the lack of space between crazy and the
following / character).
No popular scripting language I'm aware of appends the space character to an
expanded variable, so psql's behavior is rather unusual. E.g.
${HOME}/my-script.sql expands into /home/crazy/my-script.sql in a Unix shell
script.