Re: proposal: copybytea command for psql

On 02/16/2012 03:32 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan<andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
>> A while ago I went looking for nice ways to export an unencoded bytea
>> value using psql, see
>> <http://people.planetpostgresql.org/andrew/index.php?/archives/196-Clever-trick-challenge.html>.
>> Regina Obe is also in want of a solution for this:
>> <http://www.postgresonline.com/journal/archives/243-PSQL-needs-a-better-way-of-outputting-bytea-to-binary-files.html>.
>> It seems like what we need is a psql command for it, something like:
>> \copybytea (select query_returning_one_bytea) to /path/to/file
>> Does anyone have a better solution or any objection to this feature?
> It seems awfully narrow. In the first place, why restrict it to bytea?
> In the second, that syntax is going to cause serious headaches, not
> least because backslash commands can't extend across multiple lines.
>
> The idea that comes to mind for me, if you want to connect this up to
> SELECT and not COPY, is some variant of \g that implies (1) pull back
> the data as binary not text, and (2) dump it to the target file with
> absolutely no recordseps, fieldseps, etc; just the bytes, ma'am.
>
> It might be worth thinking of (1) and (2) as separately invokable
> features, or then again it might not. I also wonder how this might
> interact with Peter E's recent commit for null-byte separators.
>
>

Oh, nice idea. say \g{bn} where b was for binary fetch/output and n was
for no recordseps etc?

That looks like a winner.

cheers

andrew