Re: Running a query from the OS CLI

If I have a DB called “foo”
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-d dbname
--dbname dbname

Specifies the name of the database to connect to. This is equivalent to specifying dbname as the first non-option argument on the command line.

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...and...

I want to run “select name from table_a where name like ‘john%’”

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-c command
--command command

Specifies that psql is to execute one command string, command, and then exit. This is useful in shell scripts.

command must be either a command string that is completely parsable by the server (i.e., it contains no psql specific features), or a single backslash command. Thus you cannot mix SQL and psql meta-commands with this option. To achieve that, you could pipe the string into psql, like this: echo '\x \\ SELECT * FROM foo;' | psql. (\\ is the separator meta-command.)

If the command string contains multiple SQL commands, they are processed in a single transaction, unless there are explicit BEGIN/COMMIT commands included in the string to divide it into multiple transactions. This is different from the behavior when the same string is fed to psql's standard input.

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...and...

I want no table header “NAME” in the output

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-t
--tuples-only

Turn off printing of column names and result row count footers, etc. This is equivalent to the \t command.

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...and...

I want to do this as a one-liner from the linux command line

...and...

I don’t want to have to deal with intermediate files or home-grown programs...

Is this possible?

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Read The Fine Manual.

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