Re: What is field separator?

Tena Sakai wrote:
>   $ echo "select marker, p, afreq from gallo.fbat_sdsdecode limit 10" | \
>  > psql -P 'format=unaligned' -P 'fieldsep=\t' -t -f - musket
> What's denoted as \t is not a tab character.  It is a two character
> sequence backslash followd by a t.  I have tried all other possibilities
> such as \\t , "\t", etc that I can think of, but I cannot get an honest to
> god tab character to appear as field separator.

Yeah, that's a tough one.  In bash you can use ANSI C quoting to pull
this off:

psql -c "select name,setting from pg_settings limit 1" -d postgres -At
-F $'\t'

See http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/quoting for more information.
Portability to other shells I'm not sure about.

Note that I did two other things a little differently than your example,
as well as tightening up the abbreviations:

-Putting the command in -c " " is just better all around than piping
into psql using echo.  It even works with multi-line input, i.e.:

psql -c "
select 1
"

-Explicitly specifying the database manually using -d makes what's
happening easier to follow than expecting people to know the convention
that the first non-option passed to psql is a database name.

--
Greg Smith  2ndQuadrant US  Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg@2ndQuadrant.com   www.2ndQuadrant.us