Re: Proposed doc-patch: Identifying the Current WAL file

Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> The point is that the test does not have a
> one-second window of showing the wrong answer, meaning I could wait for
> 60 seconds, and still see the wrong WAL file at the top.

Oh, I see your point: you can lose at most one second's worth of data,
but that second could be arbitrarily long ago if it was the latest
activity in the database. Yeah, that's a bit unpleasant. So we really
do need both parts of the ordering rule, and there seems no way to do
that with just 'ls'.

I wonder if you could do anything with find(1)'s -newer switch?
It seems to be a '>' condition not a '>=' condition, so it'd be
pretty awkward ... certainly not a one-liner.

I think everyone agrees that adding a SQL function would be a reasonable
thing to do, anyway.

regards, tom lane