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@momjian.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' test1|2
$ export IFS="|"$ IFS='|' sql --no-align --tuples-only -c 'SELECT 1,2' test | while read x y; do echo $x; echo $y;
done12

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

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
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