This is a proposal for a new developer patch idea, in case someone's interested.
Keeping an eye on Stack Overflow has shown me that quite a few people seem to get confused by pg_dump and pg_restore being command line tools, not psql commands. It'd be interesting if psql detected this and gave a useful error. Ideally before they enter ; to terminate the line, since they're probably following instructions that won't show one. A related patch would be to have the parser detect \copy and other psql backslash metacommands run as SQL queries on the server and report a useful error. For \copy, it would HINT to look at their client's manual for COPY support or user server-side COPY. For others it'd say these are psql commands not postgres commands and only work in the psql client. One might argue that we don't need to pad things _this_ much for new users. But I see users getting confused by psql metacommands vs postgres server commands a lot. Similarly by pg_dump and pg_restore being shell programs. If it can be done at minimal cost to everyone else, it might be worth it. Just an idea. -- Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
