Question

How do you hide the column names and row count in the output from psql?

I’m running a SQL query via psql with:

psql --user=myuser -d mydb --output=result.txt -c "SELECT * FROM mytable;"

and I’m expecting output like:

1,abc
2,def
3,xyz

but instead I get:

id,text
-------
1,abc
2,def
3,xyz
(3 rows)

Of course, it’s not impossible to filter the top two rows and bottom row out after the fact, but it there a way to do it with only psql? Reading over its manpage, I see options for controlling the field delimiter, but nothing for hiding extraneous output.

Answer 1

You can use the -t or --tuples-only option:

psql --user=myuser -d mydb --output=result.txt -t -c "SELECT * FROM mytable;"

---

Edited (more than a year later) to add:

You also might want to check out the COPY command. I no longer have any PostgreSQL instances handy to test with, but I think you can write something along these lines:

psql --user=myuser -d mydb -c "COPY mytable TO 'result.txt' DELIMITER ','"

(except that result.txt will need to be an absolute path). The COPY command also supports a more-intelligent CSV format; see its documentation.