Juvenile BASH question

[Bill Oliver]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2013, Mark Haney wrote:

> 
> This may sound like a rather juvenile BASH question, but I'm rather stumped and hope it's something simple to fix.  I hope someone has the answer since I
> don't really have time (swapping out firewalls and half my network is down) to research it. 
> 
>  
> 
> I have a BASH script that is pretty simple, it backs up postgresQL databases using pg_dump.  It runs as root since I am copying data to a SAN and don't
> really want to configure the postgres user to have access to it.  But, in order to get everything dumped properly, I do this:
> 
>  
> 
> su postgres - -c <pgdump command>
> 
>  
> 
> Now, this has worked perfectly for 3 months now, but the last few days I started getting errors about failed authentication to the databases.  Here's
> where it gets weird.  I can su postgres - from a BASH prompt just fine,but when I run the script, it asks me for a password, which it didn't do before. 
> IIRC, I had to change the postgres user from /bin/false to /bin/bash for one of our software devs to be able to monitor the DBs via Jenkins, could that
> have something to do with it?  I can't imagine how, since I can su from the root prompt to the postgres user without asking for a password. 
> 
>  
> 
> Help!
> 
>  

It's been awhile since I used postgres, having moved to mysql, but if it's asking for the postgres admin password rather than root password, can't you get around it by putting it in a file somewhere like .pgpass or setting an environment variable like PGPASSWORD?  Maybe you need to set that in the shell you are created.  See:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/libpq-envars.html
and 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6523019/postgresql-scripting-psql-execution-with-password


billo