Thread: COPY TO STDOUT BINARY

Is COPY foo TO STDOUT BINARY supposed to work? The query will run some
time, but won't give a result.

I couldn't see any mentioning in the COPY command docs that would
prohibit use of this combination.

Tested with psql on 8.0.5 and 8.1.1.

Regards,
Andreas

Andreas Pflug <pgadmin@pse-consulting.de> writes:
> Is COPY foo TO STDOUT BINARY supposed to work?

I don't think psql will do anything particularly sane with binary copy
data, if that's what you meant.

            regards, tom lane

Tom Lane wrote:
> Andreas Pflug <pgadmin@pse-consulting.de> writes:
>
>>Is COPY foo TO STDOUT BINARY supposed to work?
>
>
> I don't think psql will do anything particularly sane with binary copy
> data, if that's what you meant.

echo "COPY foo TO STDOUT BINARY;" | psql >bar

writes a 0 bytes file; not surprised if psql doesn't act sanely in
interactive mode.

For testing, I changed slony to use COPY .. BINARY, same result.

Regards,
Andreas

Andreas Pflug wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> > Andreas Pflug <pgadmin@pse-consulting.de> writes:
> >
> >>Is COPY foo TO STDOUT BINARY supposed to work?
> >
> >
> > I don't think psql will do anything particularly sane with binary copy
> > data, if that's what you meant.
>
> echo "COPY foo TO STDOUT BINARY;" | psql >bar
>
> writes a 0 bytes file; not surprised if psql doesn't act sanely in
> interactive mode.
>
> For testing, I changed slony to use COPY .. BINARY, same result.

I tested this in a stand-alone backend and saw binary output that looked
right, so I think it is only psql that is failing.

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