Ron Johnson <ronljohnsonjr@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Mon, Dec 18, 2023 at 12:02 PM Tom Lane <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Looking at the v14 pg_ctl code, I see it has an extra level of >> looping around getopt_long to try to cope with implementations >> that don't permute the arguments. So in theory it should work as >> documented everywhere. But I could see how things might get >> confused, if the subroutine misidentifies what is a switch. > There must be some PEBKAC involved that pg_ctl error handling didn't > explain well, because _this_ unreformatted command works. After studying the code some more, I think I can reproduce it: $ pg_ctl restart foo -o "whatever" pg_ctl: too many command-line arguments (first is "restart") Try "pg_ctl --help" for more information. It should be complaining about "foo", but the message mentions "restart" instead. I think you must have had something in your non-working command that did not get interpreted as being a switch or a switch argument, leading to the misleading report. That's with v14. HEAD gets this right: $ pg_ctl restart foo -o "whatever" pg_ctl: too many command-line arguments (first is "foo") Try "pg_ctl --help" for more information. The change in behavior is evidently due to commit 03d1080d8, which got rid of the extra level of looping in pg_ctl's use of getopt_long. I surmise that after we loop around and re-invoke getopt_long, glibc's getopt_long resets "optind" to the first non-option argument, rather than honoring the increment from the bottom of the loop. This seems like a bug to me, but I'm not sure if I want to propose back-patching 03d1080d8 (and 411b72034) to deal with it. That code hasn't made it into a stable branch yet, so a back-patch would be a little bit risky. regards, tom lane
