From: Tena Sakai <tsakai@gallo.ucsf.edu>
To: Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com>
CC: Gabriele Bartolini <gabriele.bartolini@2ndQuadrant.it>,
	"pgsql-admin@postgresql.org" <pgsql-admin@postgresql.org>
Date: Mon, 31 May 2010 22:27:59 -0700
Subject: Re: What is field separator?
Thread-Topic: [ADMIN] What is field separator?
Thread-Index: AcsBN6amu9oNvB56Q3SNnGDVuAc5HgAE4vB/
Message-ID: <C829E86F.AF42%tsakai@gallo.ucsf.edu>
In-Reply-To: <4C04798D.70606@2ndquadrant.com>
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Many thanks, Greg!

I got it to work by emulating what you wrote.
But I think you meant -A, not -At below.
>> psql -c "select name,setting from pg_settings limit 1" -d postgres -At
>> -F $'\t'

Regards,

Tena Sakai
tsakai@gallo.ucsf.edu


On 5/31/10 8:07 PM, "Greg Smith" <greg@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:

> Tena Sakai wrote:
>>   $ echo "select marker, p, afreq from gallo.fbat_sdsdecode limit 10" | =
\
>>> psql -P 'format=3Dunaligned' -P 'fieldsep=3D\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.
>=20
> Yeah, that's a tough one.  In bash you can use ANSI C quoting to pull
> this off:
>=20
> psql -c "select name,setting from pg_settings limit 1" -d postgres -At
> -F $'\t'
>=20
> See http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/quoting for more information.
> Portability to other shells I'm not sure about.
>=20
> Note that I did two other things a little differently than your example,
> as well as tightening up the abbreviations:
>=20
> -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.:
>=20
> psql -c "
> select 1
> "
>=20
> -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.