Using psql, pg_dump, pg_restore in a script

Hi all,

My latest task requires me to script extracting the latest data from a partitioned table and put it into another database on a different machine on an hourly basis. To do this, the
script uses a psql command to determine which partition to grab, a pg_dump to get it, and pg_restore to put into the other Db. My issue is that I'd like to make this script very
portable but it seems that whenever you pass a "-h <somehost> -U <someuser>" to these commands, they will ask for a password whether "someuser" actually has a password or not. I've
currently set a password for the user the script uses and I'm using .pgpass to make this work, but was there some reason that an option was not given to enter a password as an
argument to the command? Maybe something like --password <somepassword>? I know this could potentially be a security problem, but so is having a password in the .pgpass file in
clear text.
--
Jay