Question

I have a bash shell script. I have a psql copy command that has captured some rows of data from a database. The data from the database are actual sql statments that I will use in the bash script. I put the statements in a database because they are of varying length and I want to be able to dynamically call certain statements.

1) I’m unsure what delimiter to use in the copy statement. I can’t use a comma or pipe because they are in my data coming from the database. I have tried a couple random characters because those are not in my database but copy has a fit and only wants one ascii character.

Also to complicate things I need to get query_name and query_string for each row.

This is what I currently have. I get all the data fine with the copy but now I just want to push the data into an array so that I will be able to loop over it later:

q="copy (select query_name,query_string from query where active=1) 
to stdout delimiter ','" 
statements=$(psql -d ${db_name} -c "${q}")
statements_split=(`echo ${statements//,/ }`)
echo ${statements_split[0]};

Answer 1

Looks to me like you actually want to build something like a dictionary (associative array) mapping query_name to query_string. bash isn’t really the best choice for handling complex data structures. I’d suggest using Perl for this kind of task if that’s an option.