"Daniel Westermann (DWE)" <daniel.westerm...@dbi-services.com> writes: >> Taking a closer look, many of the other switches-requiring-an-argument >> also just absorb "optarg" without checking its value till much later, >> so I'm not sure how far we could move the needle by special-casing >> --compress.
> My point was not so much about --compress but rather giving a good error > message. Right, and my point was that the issue is bigger than --compress. For example, you get exactly the same misbehavior with $ pg_basebackup --checkpoint=fast --format=t -d --pgdata=/var/tmp/dummy pg_basebackup: error: must specify output directory or backup target pg_basebackup: hint: Try "pg_basebackup --help" for more information. I'm not sure how to solve the problem once you consider this larger scope. I don't think we could forbid arguments beginning with "-" for all of these switches. regards, tom lane