Thread: Re: Problem V8.1.4 - providing pwd for commandline tools doesn't work anymore

> The latest version (V8.1.4) breaks the setup process of our
> application's installation wizard. We used to call
> "createdb.exe" and piped the password for the postgres user
> (which has been entered by the user in our setup wizard's
> dialogs) into it.
>
> With version V8.1.4 this is not possible anymore, the
> commandline process prompts for the password nevertheless!
> This causes our setup to "hang" (of course it doesn't hang,
> it waits for the invisible commandline process to return,
> which waits for a user input that will never complete as the
> user cannot and shall not see these commandline tools).
>
> Any suggestion? (V8.1.3 and earlier did work fine in this respect.)

Actually, no, v8.1.3 and earlier are the ones that are broken in this
respect, and it was fixed in 8.1.4.

You need to put the password either in a pgpass.conf file
(http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/libpq-pgpass.html), or put it
in the PGPASSWORD environment variable
(http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/libpq-envars.html - it's
secure on Windows per the comment)

//Magnus

I don't understand why the change should be "more secure", but I see
that nobody took care about the possible consequences for installation
scripts, third party applications and so on. :-(((

If you change such essential behaviour (the old behaviour of the
commandline tools did work well since 8.0!) and cause such an
incompatibility, you should have at least clearly stated this in the
update readme. The comment "Fix problem with password prompting on some
Win32 systems" is a little bit "short" regarding such an immens impact
on any installation script...

Sigh,

Alexander.

on 31.05.2006 10:00 Magnus Hagander wrote:
>> The latest version (V8.1.4) breaks the setup process of our
>> application's installation wizard. We used to call
>> "createdb.exe" and piped the password for the postgres user
>> (which has been entered by the user in our setup wizard's
>> dialogs) into it.
>>
>> With version V8.1.4 this is not possible anymore, the
>> commandline process prompts for the password nevertheless!
>> This causes our setup to "hang" (of course it doesn't hang,
>> it waits for the invisible commandline process to return,
>> which waits for a user input that will never complete as the
>> user cannot and shall not see these commandline tools).
>>
>> Any suggestion? (V8.1.3 and earlier did work fine in this respect.)
>
> Actually, no, v8.1.3 and earlier are the ones that are broken in this
> respect, and it was fixed in 8.1.4.
>
> You need to put the password either in a pgpass.conf file
> (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/libpq-pgpass.html), or put it
> in the PGPASSWORD environment variable
> (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/libpq-envars.html - it's
> secure on Windows per the comment)
>
> //Magnus
>
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