Re: Use of 'cp -r' in CREATE DATABASE

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Nigel J. Andrews said:
> > On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 06:36:05PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> >> > Our dbcommands.c has for create database:
> >> >
> >> > snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "cp -r '%s' '%s'", src_loc,
> >> > target_dir);
> >> >
> >> [...]
> >> >
> >> > I think we should switch to -R in our code.
> >>
> >> But you will have to write special code for Win32, won't you?
> >> Maybe it would be better to avoid using system commands
> >> altogether and copy the whole thing using syscalls ...
> >
> > That was my immediate thought. Unfortunately that means reinventing the
> > wheel; or grabbing it from BSD or somewhere and distributing it with
> > postgresql.
> >
>
> We need a consistent policy about it, I think. I grabbed some code for a
> recursive mkdir from NetBSD, and it is in initdb.c. But I also wrote a
> recursive rm, and Bruce replaced it with calls to the native utilities
> using system(), for understandable reasons. Maybe we need a small,
> portable, utility library. Or maybe just relying on system utilities is
> acceptable.

From my prespective, the native utilities are better if we can invoke
them portabily because they can handle any OS-specific issues.

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