Dean Rasheed <dean.a.rasheed@gmail.com> writes:
> Actually, that raises a different possible benefit of passing options
> in an options file -- if the user wants to pass in a table name
> pattern, it can be a nuisance if the shell's argument processing does
> additional unwanted things like globbing and environment variable
> substitutions. Using an options file could provide a handy way to
> ensure that any option values are interpreted exactly as written,
> without any additional mangling.
Huh? Any format we might devise, or borrow, will have to have some
kind of escaping/quoting convention. The idea that "we don't need
that" tends to lead to very ugly workarounds later.
I do agree that the shell's quoting conventions are pretty messy
and so those aren't the ones we should borrow. We could do a lot
worse than to use some established data format like JSON or YAML.
Given that we already have src/common/jsonapi.c, it seems like
JSON would be the better choice of those two.
regards, tom lane