Re: Database backup

On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 08:53, dima wrote:
> > I am trying to automate my backups using pg_dump. However, I am not able to
> > pass the password to the command. Has anybody sucessfully done automated
> > backup thru scripts?
> export PGPASSWORD=password && pg_dump ... && export PGPASSWORD=""

Presumably the second export is to conceal PGPASSWORD; it would not be
executed if pg_dump were to fail, because && means execute the following
pipeline only if the previous command succeeds. This should read:

  export PGPASSWORD=password && pg_dump ... ; export PGPASSWORD=""

Better than this is to use ~/.pgpass, which is a new feature in 7.3.
That would not expose the administrator's password to being scanned in
the process table.  Use of ~/.pgpass is described in the libpq manual,
section 1.11

--
Oliver Elphick                                Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight, UK                             http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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