I believe that pg_autovacuum will work with a .pgpass file just like any libpq based application.
It should, yes. I've applied the attached patch to HEAD and REL8_0_STABLE that makes the security warning about -P more broad, and suggests using ~/.pgpass instead.
-Neil
Index: contrib/pg_autovacuum/README.pg_autovacuum
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/pgsql/contrib/pg_autovacuum/README.pg_autovacuum,v
retrieving revision 1.12
diff -c -r1.12 README.pg_autovacuum
*** contrib/pg_autovacuum/README.pg_autovacuum 24 Jan 2005 00:17:33 -0000 1.12
--- contrib/pg_autovacuum/README.pg_autovacuum 30 Mar 2005 05:03:55 -0000
***************
*** 36,44 ****
pg_autovacuum requires that the statistics system be enabled and
reporting row level stats. The overhead of the stats system has been
! shown to have a significant cost under certain workloads. For
! instance, a tight loop of queries performing "select 1" was found to
! run nearly 30% slower when stats were enabled. However, in practice,
with more realistic workloads, the stats system overhead is usually
nominal.
--- 36,44 ----
pg_autovacuum requires that the statistics system be enabled and
reporting row level stats. The overhead of the stats system has been
! shown to be significant under certain workloads. For instance, a
! tight loop of queries performing "select 1" was found to run nearly
! 30% slower when row-level stats were enabled. However, in practice,
with more realistic workloads, the stats system overhead is usually
nominal.
***************
*** 127,134 ****
-U username: Username pg_autovacuum will use to connect with, if not
specified the current username is used.
-P password: Password pg_autovacuum will use to connect with. *WARNING*
! When installed as a Windows Service, this option will be stored in plain
! text in the registry.
-H host: host name or IP to connect to.
-p port: port used for connection.
-h help: list of command line options.
--- 127,137 ----
-U username: Username pg_autovacuum will use to connect with, if not
specified the current username is used.
-P password: Password pg_autovacuum will use to connect with. *WARNING*
! This option is insecure. When installed as a Windows Service, this
! option will be stored in plain text in the registry. When used with
! most Unix variants, other users will be able to see the argument to
! the "-P" option via ps(1). The ~/.pgpass file can be used to
! specify a password more securely.
-H host: host name or IP to connect to.
-p port: port used for connection.
-h help: list of command line options.
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