Message-ID: <4C04798D.70606@2ndquadrant.com>
Date: Mon, 31 May 2010 23:07:57 -0400
From: Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com>
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To: Tena Sakai <tsakai@gallo.ucsf.edu>
CC: Gabriele Bartolini <gabriele.bartolini@2ndQuadrant.it>,
	"pgsql-admin@postgresql.org" <pgsql-admin@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: What is field separator?
References: <C829B239.AF3B%tsakai@gallo.ucsf.edu>
In-Reply-To: <C829B239.AF3B%tsakai@gallo.ucsf.edu>
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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