Re: How to debug: password authentication failed for user

On Thu, Feb 27, 2025 at 1:32 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> > -c 'ALTER USER timeshift_user PASSWORD '"'"'timeshift_pass'"'"';'
> > I am still trying to work out what that quoting is doing?
>

That's standard for -x output for some versions of bash. FWIW, none of the
shells I had access to output it quite like that, but who knows what shell
the OP has. It's basically trying to stop the current ALTER USER statement,
add a new single quote (but wrap it in double quotes!), then start a new
single-quoted string (the actual password). (So single,
double-single-double, single). Then do it all again at the end. It's valid,
and it should really be equivalent to PASSWORD 'timeshift_pass' so it's
hard to see what the problem is.

The fact that a manual ALTER ROLE cleared it up certainly suggests that
something is going wrong, however, and the SELECT rolpassword output
definitely means it had some password. A possibility is that somehow the
user password was already set and this particular statement was not run (or
run on a different cluster).

Another debug technique might be to have the shell script write the
ALTER USER command to a temp file, then slurp it in via psql -f. Then you
can cat that file as part of the script's output

Cheers,
Greg

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