Thanks for the quick response. I see that pg_dumpall outputs the global
objects (-g) to stdout and that it cannot be combined with the -F or -f for
this reason. I would still like to be able to do a full database backup,
including all databases with oids and blobs, from a generic shell script
that did not know about which databases existed. Under the current set of
utilities this does not seem to be possible without coding the script to
run:
pg_dump --oids --blobs --format=c
for each database and sending each database to it's own backup file. By
modifying the logic of the pg_dumpall script a solution might be possible.
I propose the following backup logic:
1. Backup all the globals to a text file.
pg_dumpall --globals-only > globals.dump
2. Backup all the schemas to a text file, don't output globals.
pg_dumpall --schema-only > schema.dump
3. Backup all the databases to a custom file, don't output globals.
pg_dumpall --data-only --format=c --oids --blobs > data.dump
This presumes however that the custom file formats output by each pg_dump
for a database can be concatenated into a single file. Is this possible?
If so, pg_dumpall would only need to detect --globals-only. If it is used
then output global information to stdio. If it is not present then call
pg_dump for each database with the full set of parameters given and don't
output anything from pg_dumpall.