On Mon, Dec 18, 2023 at 12:02 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
Ron Johnson <ronljohnsonjr@gmail.com> writes: > On Mon, Dec 18, 2023 at 11:09 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: >> So, what's the platform? And are you quite sure your psql is v14?
> $ psql -V > psql (PostgreSQL) 14.10 > $ postgres -V > postgres (PostgreSQL) 14.10 > $ cat /etc/redhat-release > Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.9 (Ootpa) > # This is a "SLES Expanded Support platform 8.9" > # The above "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server" string is only used to > # keep software compatibility.
Hmph. I'm on (genuine) RHEL 8.9, and when I tried the command you showed it seemed to work fine. So there's some important detail you've not provided. Now I'm wondering about things like invisible characters and whether you managed to type something that looks like a "-" but is really some weird unicode character.
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. (I changed the script, to make the startup options explicit.)