Re: BUG #19388: Failing to connect to postgres with EACCES error - Mailing list pgsql-bugs

Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> On Fri, Jan 23, 2026 at 7:35 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> If anything, I'd lean towards removing the special exception for
>> ENOTDIR ... I wonder why that's there.

> I think removing that would take some adjustments to
> pqGetHomeDirectory(), so that it actually checks for the existence of
> that directory before returning true. `have_homedir` is kind of a
> misleading name in this context.

I dug into our git history and traced the appearance of ENOTDIR to

commit 5b40677986984d450a2a16e515fe44d90dfeef02
Author: Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>
Date:   Sat Dec 3 15:02:53 2011 +0100

    Treat ENOTDIR as ENOENT when looking for client certificate file
    
    This makes it possible to use a libpq app with home directory set
    to /dev/null, for example - treating it the same as if the file
    doesn't exist (which it doesn't).
    
    Per bug #6302, reported by Diego Elio Petteno

We could imagine pushing the stat() test into pqGetHomeDirectory,
which might be a more sensible factorization, but I don't think
it'd move the behavior much.

            regards, tom lane