> I know that I've seen this somewhere in past messages, but I can't seem
> to find how to search the archives. Is the search engine offline?
>
> Anyway, I'm trying to write a shell script which will backup my
> databases to DAT tape. I'd like to know how I could get the list of
> existing database names from Postgres. For example, I have 3 databases
> named db01, db02, db03. How can I ask Postgres for these 3 names?
There are a few ways... such as doing something like "psql -d
template1 -c \l" on the command line, and parsing the output. You could
also do a pg_dumpall instead of a pg_dump, but it's not always the best for
a backup. It makes it nice if you have to restore the entire server, but
if you just need to restore one particular database, then you have to edit
the file.
steve