Question

I have been tasked with creating pg_dump files for a db on which there are over 50 tables. I know how to do this manually via the psql command line, but I believe there must be a faster way than doing each one by hand. Any suggestions on how to it programmatically? For example, can a perl script call pg_dump?

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly, then following Bash script should be sufficient:

#!/bin/bash

for table in `psql -Atc "\dt" | cut -d '|' -f2`   
do   
   pg_dump -Fp -t $table -f $table.dump;
done

It gets list of all tables within some database and execute pg_dump -t for each of them.

Here is Perl equivalent if you prefer:

#!/usr/bin/perl

@tables = qx/psql -Atc "\\dt" | cut -d '|' -f2/;
foreach (@tables)
{
    chomp($_);
    system("pg_dump -Fp -t $_ -f $_.dump");
}