Awhile back in the discussion about the \if feature for psql,
I'd pointed out that you shouldn't really need very much in
the way of boolean-expression evaluation smarts, because you
ought to be able to use a backtick shell escape:
\if `expr :foo \> :bar` \echo :foo is greater than :bar\endif
Now that the basic feature is in, I went to play around with this,
and was disappointed to find out that it doesn't work. The reason
is not far to seek: we do not do variable substitution within the
text between backticks. psqlscanslash.l already foresaw that some
day we'd want to do that:
/* * backticked text: copy everything until next backquote, then evaluate. * * XXX Possible future behavioral change:
substitutefor :VARIABLE? */
I think today is that day, because it's going to make a material
difference to the usability of this feature.
I propose extending backtick processing so that
1. :VARIABLE is replaced by the contents of the variable
2. :'VARIABLE' is replaced by the contents of the variable,
single-quoted according to Unix shell conventions. (So the
processing would be a bit different from what it is for the
same notation in SQL contexts.)
This doesn't look like it would take very much new code to do.
Thoughts?
regards, tom lane