Re: \dS and \df <pattern> crashing psql

On Fri, 26 May 2000, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> The \d series of psql commands are really just shortcuts for various SQL
> queries to the system catalogs. Start psql with the -E option to see them.
> Therefore it is unlikely that this behaviour is entirely localized at
> these functions. Have you run the regression tests without problems?

First of all, this was not a Postgres bug but a configuration mistake on
my part. I had been meaning to write back to the list explaining what
really happened:

I compiled 7.0 with locale support, recode, and multibyte options all
enabled. In the postgres (db superuser) .cshrc, I had set LC_CTYPE to
"en_US". This was the problem. When I would start postmaster and run
anything that involved a regexp (and the query that \dS expands to uses
regexps) on a "bytea" type field, psql would crash.

To fix this, I tried first letting the locale default to "C", then setting
LC_CTYPE to "iso_8859_1". Starting postmaster with either of these works
perfectly.

If you are still interested in server output or backtraces (perhaps to
implement a more graceful exit?), I'd be glad to send them, but I'm sure
you can replicate this pretty easily now if required.

I have never needed to mess around with locales before, so I apologize for
posting this as bug -- I didn't quite know where to look at first.

By the way, I don't know what you guys have done with the optimizer but my
previously slow queries now run VERY FAST. This prevents me from
taking cigarette breaks, coffee breaks, etc. under the "I'm running a
large query" pretext. Please do what you can to fix this problem.

Thanks for the help,

Nishad