Re: Application name patch - v2

2009/10/20 Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>:
> Robert Haas wrote:
>> > I do agree with Peter's concerns about limiting the character set of the
>> > name string, and maybe there should be some sort of length limit too.
>>
>> I don't have a strong feeling about this.  If limiting this to 7-bit
>> characters solves some nasty encoding problems or something, then
>> fine, but otherwise I think we can just escape what we emit into the
>> log and say that users who log this information should have a
>> sufficiently sophisticated log parser to cope with it.
>
> Once problem I can imagine is someone with a long log_line prefix, like
> '%t %a|', and assuming that the pipe is the end of the log_prefix
> arguments.  If someone adds a pipe to the application name, log parsing
> code will assume the %a pipe ends the log_line_prefix, and we have no
> system of escaping things like pipes in log_line_prefix.
>
> Effectively, if you use %a, there is no good way to terminate
> log_line_prefix with a known unique character.

If you're going to parse your logfile, you should probably be using
CSV format logs, which I believe would not have this issue...

-- Magnus HaganderMe: http://www.hagander.net/Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/