I found what seems to be an odd difference between COPY and \copy parsing.
I am using a bash pipeline of sed commands to clean up a source data file before importing it into a table. This works fine when working from the command line and piping the result to psql on STDIN.
However I attempted to put this same workflow into a psql script (as opposed to a shell script). To avoid quoting issues with the shell pipeline I put my pipeline command string in dollar quotes.
eg.
COPY dest_table FROM PROGRAM $$ sed 's/x/y/' | etc... $$
To my surprise this worked with COPY but not \COPY which failed with:
\copy: parse error at "$$"
Is this an undocumented difference? Is this even the appropriate email list to ask this kind of question or report such a difference?
Thank you,
Alex Stoddard
