On 5 Sep 2002 at 12:33, Rod Taylor wrote: > My understanding is that it's a single password, not a list. > > As such you would probably not want a default, as each database you > connect to will (should?) have a different password. By setting a > default file we may encourage users to use the same password > throughout all PostgreSQL databases.
If a password file could only hold a single password, one would constantly need to check and change the environmet variable when he frequently changes between different databases and that would IMHO withdraw most of the benefits of having such a file. I would rather want to have a single file, that can hold multiple entries and also allows commenting out entries. And why only put the passwords into that file? The entries could be complete connection info tuples including hostname, username, password, and maybe more parameters, so that databases can be addressed by a nickname. I think of something like --- snip --- foo password=foopass bar hostname=foo.bar.com dbname=foodb user=max password=xyz --- snap --- So even the remote "bar" database could be accessed by a simple $ psql bar If there is still need to have the password file on another than the default place, e.g. because the home directory is on NFS and thus considered unsafe, the file format could simply allow some sort of include command. cu Reinhard ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly