Per tonight's dinner discussion, it Sure Would Be Nice if psql had an additional option that allowed passing in a conninfo string.
The notion: Plenty of libraries out there like Pg, DBI::Pg, and such make you specify connections in the form: "host=my.db.host.example.org port=5678 dbname=dumb_db user=chewie" Since those strings need to be kept around for the programs that are directly using conninfo, it Sure Would Be Nice if those strings could also be used as arguments to psql. Peter Eisentraut observed that "-D" is not yet used; that's certainly an option. Thus, supposing we kept conninfo strings in a series of files in /opt/scripts/conninfo, we might run a script via... #!/bin/sh CONNINFO=`cat /opt/scripts/conninfo/dumb_db.conninfo` PERIOD='90 days' QUERY="delete from my_table where trans_on < now() - '${PERIOD}'::interval;" QUERY2="vacuum analyze my_table;" psql -D "${CONNINFO}" -c "${QUERY}" psql --pqconninfo="${CONNINFO}" -c "${QUERY2}" I'm not sure those are forcibly the best names for options, but they're a thought... -- select 'cbbrowne' || '@' || 'gmail.com'; http://linuxdatabases.info/info/ Rules of the Evil Overlord #10. "I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum -- a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well." <http://www.eviloverlord.com/> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq