Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2019 14:08:39 -0500
From: Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>
To: pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: v12 and pg_restore -f-
Message-ID: <20191006190839.GE18030@telsasoft.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.24 (2015-08-30)
Precedence: bulk

This is a "heads up" for others upgrading to v12.  I found a solution for our
use case, but it'd be easy to miss this, even if you read the release notes.

I saw this and updated our scripts with pg_restore -f-
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/release-12.html
|In pg_restore, require specification of -f - to send the dump contents to standard output (Euler Taveira)
|Previously, this happened by default if no destination was specified, but that was deemed to be unfriendly.

What I didn't realize at first is that -f- has no special meaning in v11 - it
just writes a file called ./-  And it's considered untennable to change
behavior of v11.

In our use, that was being piped to sed, which then saw nothing on its stdin
and just exits..  I changed our script to use pg_restore -f /dev/stdout, which
seems to be portable across postgres versions for the OS distribution we're
running.  Unfortunately, I can't think of anything portable across *OS* or
useful to include in documentation.  In the worst case, someone might need to
call pg_restore differently based on its version.

Justin