> Please let the list know if you get a solution, I am about to go to 7.2 on
> my production machines but that could be a show stopper if the cron job
> cannot automatically back it up anymore.
You might try this with expect (customizing necessary):
#!/usr/bin/expect -f
# wrapper to make passwd(1) be non-interactive
# username is passed as 1st arg, passwd as 2nd
set password xxx
spawn /usr/bin/psql -d db
expect "password:"
sleep 1
send "$password\r"
expect "password:"
sleep 1
send "$password\r"
expect eof
Greetings,
Bjoern