Fdbcli option usage: "option on TIMEOUT 0" results in error 2006

Using FoundationDB
1

Looking for an example for how to properly use options in fdbcli or a (probably simple) explanation for why the following straightforward command results in an error:

fdbcli --exec "option on TIMEOUT 0; getrange \x00 \xFF"
>>> option on TIMEOUT 0
Option enabled for all transactions
>>> getrange \x00 \xff
ERROR: Option set with an invalid value (2006)
2

Interesting. What seems to be happening is that options take byte strings as their parameter, and in this case the value “0” is being passed in as a byte string. The option code tries to interpret the byte string as an 8-byte little endian integer and that of course fails.

It works if you instead try:

option on TIMEOUT \x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00

Of course, that’s a bit awkward. I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to set a numeric option in fdbcli, so I hadn’t really ever considered that it would behave this way.

For the specific case of setting a timeout, though, we have an option that you can pass in (which is for some reason undocumented) called --timeout, and it only works with --exec. For example:

fdbcli --exec "getrange \x00 \xff" --timeout 5

The default behavior is to have no timeout, so if you want the value 0 you don’t need to do anything special.

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