Re: BUG #19388: Failing to connect to postgres with EACCES error

Jacob Champion <jacob(dot)champion(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> On Fri, Jan 23, 2026 at 7:35 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> If anything, I'd lean towards removing the special exception for
>> ENOTDIR ... I wonder why that's there.

> I think removing that would take some adjustments to
> pqGetHomeDirectory(), so that it actually checks for the existence of
> that directory before returning true. `have_homedir` is kind of a
> misleading name in this context.

I dug into our git history and traced the appearance of ENOTDIR to

commit 5b40677986984d450a2a16e515fe44d90dfeef02
Author: Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>
Date: Sat Dec 3 15:02:53 2011 +0100

Treat ENOTDIR as ENOENT when looking for client certificate file

This makes it possible to use a libpq app with home directory set
to /dev/null, for example - treating it the same as if the file
doesn't exist (which it doesn't).

Per bug #6302, reported by Diego Elio Petteno

We could imagine pushing the stat() test into pqGetHomeDirectory,
which might be a more sensible factorization, but I don't think
it'd move the behavior much.

regards, tom lane