Features that ARE NOT features. That makes them...?
PostgreSQL's pg_dump[all] commands always output to STDOUT. Their man pages laud this as a great idea: you can do whatever you want with the output data, including piping it to something that reformats it. Good for them. That's exactly half the utility I wanted. You can't supply any sort of flag to redirect their output to a file besides a standard shell redirect.
The thing about shell redirects is that they assume zero layers of indirection in the shell. N layers of shell indirection require something like 1+(N * 2) layers of escaping (but maybe not, all the time, depending on how you escape and how you quote, and whether you use single- or double-quotes, and don't get me started on backticks... Never mind which shells eat \ escaping and which don't, and when some do and others don't). When those layers are sudo, ssh, and su postgres -c, it gets really complicated. Some of those eat escapes, some don't, some do with but not without a tty attached (which isn't really the same as "interactively"). Every single time I have to do this, I have to start blackbox testing from the ground up.
Just give me a mother-fucking -o, bitches. Please. Thank you.
The thing about shell redirects is that they assume zero layers of indirection in the shell. N layers of shell indirection require something like 1+(N * 2) layers of escaping (but maybe not, all the time, depending on how you escape and how you quote, and whether you use single- or double-quotes, and don't get me started on backticks... Never mind which shells eat \ escaping and which don't, and when some do and others don't). When those layers are sudo, ssh, and su postgres -c, it gets really complicated. Some of those eat escapes, some don't, some do with but not without a tty attached (which isn't really the same as "interactively"). Every single time I have to do this, I have to start blackbox testing from the ground up.
Just give me a mother-fucking -o, bitches. Please. Thank you.