Re: PGPASSWORD and client tools

Tom Lane wrote:

>Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl(at)familyhealth(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
>
>
>>>After some tests, I found that using the PGPASSWORD environment variable
>>>will do the job. I'm a bit irritated that it's marked "deprecated" in
>>>the docs, the .pgpass solution isn't a good one for tool managed passwords.
>>>
>>>
>
>
>
>>I didn't notice it was deprecated either - it's the only way that
>>phpPgAdmin can integrate with pg_dump...
>>
>>
>
>It's deprecated because it's insecure, on platforms where other users can
>see the environment variables passed to pg_dump (which apparently is
>quite a few variants of Unix). You wouldn't pass the password on the
>command line either ...
>
>Painful as .pgpass may be for an admin tool, I do not know of any other
>method I'd recommend on a multiuser machine.
>
>
>
>

How about an environment variable that points to a .pgpass type file. Or
we could even play games with PGPASSWORD - if it names an existing file
that satisfies the .pgpass criteria then it will be taken as the
location of the .pgpass file instead of $HOME/.pgpass - otherwise its
value will be considered to be the password itself. The Chris could have
phppgadmin write the password file, set the environment var and call
pg_dump happily (and remove the file afterwards).

cheers

andrew