Re: pg_dump --comment?

This can be accomplished with 10-20 lines of shell scripting. I don't
think it's worth the trouble bloating pg_dump with it at all.

Jan

On 5/27/2004 10:10 PM, Chris Campbell wrote:
> I've encountered a situation where I'd like to store some information
> about the database when I do a pg_dump. For instance, the timestamp of
> the dump. And some other information that I pull from the database.
>
> If pg_dump had a --comment flag that allowed me to pass a string that
> would be stored inside the dumpfile, that I could then retrieve in some
> way (without doing a full restore of the dump), that would meet my
> needs. In discussing this idea with other people, it sounded like a
> general-use feature that mankind as a whole could benefit from. :)
>
> Here's what I'm envisioning:
>
> pg_dump --comment 'This is a comment' <more pg_dump args>
>
> That would store the comment ('This is a comment') in the dump file
> somehow. The definition of "somehow" would vary depending on the output
> format (text, tar, or custom). Initially, since I only use the custom
> format, I would only focus on getting it to work with that. But for the
> text format, there could be a SQL comment at the top of the file with
>
> -- COMMENT: This is a comment
>
> or something. In the tar format, there could be a "comment" file in the
> archive that contains the text "This is a comment".
>
> For the custom format...I haven't looked at the format specification, so
> I don't know exactly where the comment would go. It could go at the very
> top of the file, and have a special delimiter after it. pg_restore would
> just skim over the file until the delimiter is reached, and then go on
> about its business. The benefit of this scheme is that any program could
> read the comment -- just open a file and read the bytes until the delimiter.
>
> There could also be a pg_dump or pg_restore option that prints out the
> comment stored in a given dump file, or another binary (pg_comment?)
> that does that.
>
> Is this a desirable feature? Should I work it up like described and
> submit a patch? Any comments/suggestions?
>
> Thanks!
>
> - Chris

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