Hi,
On 2023-02-01 12:27:19 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> 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".
We seem to be doing OK with using SHELLPROG in pg_regress, which just
seems to be using $SHELL from the build environment.
Greetings,
Andres Freund