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From: Gary Stainburn <gary.stainburn@ringways.co.uk>
Organization: Ringways Garages Ltd
To: Wayne Johnson <wdtj@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Calling psql from a shell script
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 15:18:00 +0100
References: <3B3A7DEE.1FE009CE@yahoo.com>
In-Reply-To: <3B3A7DEE.1FE009CE@yahoo.com>
Cc: "pgsql-interfaces" <pgsql-interfaces@postgresql.org>
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Message-Id: <01062815180000.21902@gary.ringways.co.uk>
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Hi Wayne,

There should be no problems using psql in shell scripts.  I do it to provide 
HTML output in some of my early cgi's (although I now use Perl/DBI).

I think you can get psql to squirt out the data in kinda CSV format by 
setting the delimiters that it should use.  It's a long time since I did 
anything like that, but I think it's got something to do with the \pset 
commands.

The way I do it is to pass the commands to psql through STDIN using a heredoc 
inside the shell script, and then use \o to direct the output and send STDOUT 
to the bit bucket.  Using the -q option to psql to quiet the startup and 
prompt outputs, you could do it with STDOUT directly.

Gary

On Thursday 28 June 2001  1:44 am, you wrote:
> I am writing some shell scripts that need to access Postgresql.
>
> What is the best way to select a record and have shell variables set to
> the results.
>
> Is there a way to get psql to output data in quoted CSV?
>
> TIA.
>
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-- 
Gary Stainburn
 
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