Triage needed; Some bugs and annoyances I found

[bbergeron0]

Passing Passwords Insecurely

After typing 'export SQLCMDPASSWORD=...', the environment variable is visible to all child processes (any command and background process started by the shell). When creating a user (or with any operation needing a password), it would be wiser to read the password form STDIN.

Segfault

I have this segfault. I solved it by deleting sqlcmd's config file.

[signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x0 pc=0x81990d]

goroutine 1 [running]:
github.com/microsoft/go-sqlcmd/internal/config.GetCurrentContextInfo()
       /home/vsts/work/1/s/internal/config/context.go:105 +0x10d
main.initializeEnvVars()
       /home/vsts/work/1/s/cmd/modern/main.go:83 +0xcf
main.main()
       /home/vsts/work/1/s/cmd/modern/main.go:51 +0x20c

-?

? is a special character on Linux shells, so we're forced to put quotes around ('-?'). Conventions recommend using -h or --help.

XDG Directories

A lot of softwares dumps their cache/config/data/whatever in ~/.<appname>, polluting the user's home. XDG users directories are standard directories for well-known data type (configurations, appdata, cache...). For sqlcmd, on such path would be ~/.config/sqlcmd instead of ~/.sqlcmd. Right now, I have 21 applications managing their configuration the annoying way, and it would be delightful if sqlcmd did better than them.

Can't use empty passwords

MSSQL logins without passwords can exist, yet I can't add one through sqlcmd config add-user.

liner

Whenever I use sqlcmd in a shell script I get this error: liner: function not supported in this terminal

sqlcmd: v0.15.4
I apologize for the triage this issue may impose, or if I brought already mentioned issues.

[stuartpa]

@apoorvdeshmukh -> I'm guessing the first issue might be because the user for the current context doesn't have BasicAuth, so it's hitting a seg violation.

[stuartpa]

@bbergeron0 -> the -? is there for back-compt (it's been like that for decades). It works fine on my own WSL ubuntu distro. (no quotes required). -h is already taken. We do provide --help support which gives the modern CLI commands help.

[stuartpa]

@bbergeron0 -> we are staying close to popular CLIs like kubectl and az which do this by default. But you can override the default by providing the --sqlconfig flag and specify whatever directory that works for you.

[stuartpa]

@bbergeron0 -> We have #262 entered, to add support for passing password in via STDIN. Also, the environment variable can be cleared by typing export SQLCMDPASSWORD=

[shueybubbles]

For the liner issue in script - are you trying to run sqlcmd in interactive mode from a script? What command line arguments are you using there?

I'm amenable to putting the -P parameter back in, to be compatible with the ODBC command line. It should be up to the user to decide if having a plain text password on the command line meets their organization's security requirements.

[bbergeron0]

Hi, I'm trying to do this (in a bash script): sqlcmd -U User -S db.local -d "$1" -Q "SELECT * FROM entities" | tee "$1/entities.txt"