Re: .pgpass file and unix domain sockets

Joachim Wieland <joe@mcknight.de> writes:
> The documentation suggests that the hostname part of .pgpass can be set to
> "localhost" to allow for automatic unix domain socket authentication. This
> doesn't seem to work. Instead you have to set the directory of the socket as
> the hostname part.

It looks to me like if you don't specify the host in the connection request,
then "localhost" is indeed used to search .pgpass with.  *However*, if
you specify a socket path in pghost, then that's what's used.

I'm not sure if that's a bug or not.  Arguably, different socket paths
might point to different servers for which you need different passwords.
If we did want unix-socket connections to search for "localhost"
regardless of socket path, it'd be a simple change (change the order of
operations in connectOptions2).  But maybe the code is right and we
should fix the documentation.  Or maybe this whole notion of using
"localhost" is bogus and we should always use the socket path.
        regards, tom lane