Question

I want to dump a select query to a tab-delimited text file using psql -F. However, this doesn’t work:

psql -Umyuser mydb -F '\t' --no-align -c "select * from mytable" -o /tmp/dumpfile.txt

That makes the delimiter a literal \t. How do I get it to use real tabs instead?

Answer 1

I think you just need to use a literal tab. How this works depends on your shell. Have you seen this post?

In the bash shell you can do this with $'\t'.

Using the example in your question:

psql -Umyuser mydb -AF $'\t' --no-align -c "select * from mytable" -o /tmp/dumpfile.txt

From man bash:

Words of the form $’string’ are treated specially. The word expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard. […] The expanded result is single-quoted, as if the dollar sign had not been present.