Re: VIP: new format for psql - shell - simple using psql in shell

On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 12:43:40PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
> > On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 05:39:23PM +0200, Pavel Stehule wrote:
> >> I proposed new psql's format "shell". This format is optimized for
> >> processing returned result in shell:
>
> > I am unclear exactly how this relates to shells.
>
> What I'm unclear on is why we'd want to encourage that style of
> programming. The most charitable prediction of performance is that it
> would suck --- not only do you have all the inefficiencies inherent in
> row-by-row result processing with a shell script, but you're forcing a
> separate database connection for each query. And I don't actually see
> where it would be especially convenient to use, compared to say perl
> or python or other scripting languages. I'd rather see us worrying
> about the convenience of cases like

Wouldn't you just us unaligned mode for this, and set IFS to '|'?

$ psql --no-align --tuples-only -c 'SELECT 1,2' test
1|2

$ export IFS="|"
$ IFS='|' sql --no-align --tuples-only -c 'SELECT 1,2' test |
while read x y; do echo $x; echo $y; done
1
2

Are you worried about pipes in data? Does you idea fix this?

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +