The default psql -c record separator is a newline when output is the screen, console or a file. But what if I'm required to send output to a variable and not to a file (or standard output?) command="`psql -c "SELECT * FROM pg_stat_database`" when you retain the query result within the variable $command you need to count all the fields in the entire output in order to select the particular one that you want. (because the record separator newline doesn't apply to within the variable named above) Therefore all the sql output is bundled up into one string with very, very many fields. It so happened that field 38 was the number of pages served from disk for one of my databases and field 53 turned out to be the number of pages served from cache for another one of my databases. But this is hardly a sensible way of producing results! Is there a more sensible way of formatting the sql output within the specified variable I've called $command? I know that, obviously, if you output the result of the sql query to a file and then use grep and awk you could have wonderful output all the time. But there is a specific requirement here to do all the formatting from within a variable! Thanks, Andrew -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
