Re: FW: [ppa-dev] Severe bug in debian - phppgadmin opens

> Lincoln Yeoh <lyeoh@pop.jaring.my> writes:
> > At 01:08 AM 11/28/01 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> ...  Password auth sucks from a convenience point of view
> >> (or even from a possibility point of view, for scripts; don't forget
> >> the changes that you yourself recently applied to guarantee that a
> >> script *cannot* supply a password to psql).
> 
> > Ack. We can't send in passwords to psql anymore? :(
> 
> Well, Bruce, you were the one that was hot to make that /dev/tty change.
> Time to defend it.

Hey, if people want it back, it is easy to do.

My only goal was to make psql consistent with other applications that
require passwords.

> > Is there a safe way to send username and password to psql?
> 
> If you want to put those things in a script, you could still do
> 
>     export PGUSER=whatever
>     export PGPASSWORD=whatever
>     psql ...
> 
> This would actually work a lot better than other ways for cases such
> as doing pg_dumpall, where you'd otherwise need to supply the password
> multiple times.

What about 'ps -e' that shows all environment variables?  This is in
some ways worse than piping the password into psql.  At least there was
some chance that they were using 'cat' from a file with the proper
permissions.  WIth PGPASSWORD, there is no way to restrict who can see
it via 'ps -e'.

Seems we shouldn't allow PGPASSWORD either.

The idea of allowing the password to be stored in a file with 600
permissions seems quite standard.  CVS does this.

--  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610)
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