The libpgcommon patch made that unnecessary, palloc and friends are now
available in frontend programs too, mapped to plain old malloc.
As pointed out by Alvaro Herrera.
This includes backend "COPY TO/FROM PROGRAM '...'" syntax, and corresponding
psql \copy syntax. Like with reading/writing files, the backend version is
superuser-only, and in the psql version, the program is run in the client.
In the passing, the psql \copy STDIN/STDOUT syntax is subtly changed: if you
the stdin/stdout is quoted, it's now interpreted as a filename. For example,
"\copy foo from 'stdin'" now reads from a file called 'stdin', not from
standard input. Before this, there was no way to specify a filename called
stdin, stdout, pstdin or pstdout.
This creates a new function in pgport, wait_result_to_str(), which can
be used to convert the exit status of a process, as returned by wait(3),
to a human-readable string.
Etsuro Fujita, reviewed by Amit Kapila.
Bruce Momjian
Heikki Linnakangas