Sorry for the duplicate post. I forgot to mention this is with Postgresql 7.2.2.
It seems the psql \copy command doesn't work properly when dealing with certain non-ascii characters (which ones I don't know). At any rate I took some binary data and escaped it like so with perl. $text=~s/\\/\\\\/g; $text=~s/\n/\\\n/g; $text=~s/\t/\\\t/g; In other words I escaped escape characters, newlines and tabs. I made a table like this CREATE TABLE "testtable" ( "somenumber" integer DEFAULT '0' NOT NULL, "sometext" text DEFAULT '' NOT NULL ); I made my input file by printing out a asciified number, a tab, the text above and a newline. This is the attached file. In the event attached files get stripped by the mailing list it is also at http://www.aracnet.com/~paulb/sample-data When I do copy testtable from '/home/paulb/sample-data'; it works fine. When I do \copy testtable from '/home/paulb/sample-data' I get ERROR: copy: line 2, pg_atoi: error in "(binary gobbledygook)
sample-data
Description: Binary data
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