Re: [PATCH] Fix missing argument handling in psql getopt

Quentin Rameau <quinq(at)fifth(dot)space> writes:
>> Um ... so how would control get there with optind too large?

> That's from the getopt specification[0]:

> “If the option was the last character in the string pointed to by an
> element of argv, then optarg shall contain the next element of argv,
> and optind shall be incremented by 2. If the resulting value of optind
> is greater than argc, this indicates a missing option-argument, and
> getopt() shall return an error indication.”

Hm, interesting --- glibc doesn't seem to do that (advance optind past
argc), nor do any of the principal BSDen. I see that this could be
read as requiring it, but it seems like musl is pretty out of step
by reading it that way.

I actually don't care for that code very much and would prefer that
we nuke it entirely, because I think it's assuming more than it ought to
about the meaning of optind: in the case of multiple option letters in one
argv element, it's unspecified exactly when optind advances. So the other
problem here is that sometimes it's looking at the argv element *before*
the relevant one. (It's easily demonstrated that this is so with glibc's
getopt().) Probably that doesn't ever result in wrong behavior in
practice, but it still seems bogus.

The normal case of "psql -?" is handled before we ever get to this code,
so if we just deleted '?' entirely from this logic, it would mostly do
what we want. The case that would change is, eg,

psql -f foo -?

where now you get a usage message but you'd just get an "invalid option"
complaint without the special case. Seeing that none of our other
command-line programs have this special case, I'm not sure why psql
still does.

regards, tom lane