Steve, you're right! After permission was changed, the function works! Thanks Tom, too! When I wrote my entry, although I had tried to debug by outputting errors using '<', I used it to the same directory as the output file, which prevented any message from appearing because of the same permission issue. This active mailinglist is very helpful for a novice as myself. Thanks a lot! Sam On Feb 7, 2008 6:29 PM, Steve Crawford <scrawford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Tom Lane wrote: > > "Satoru Fukushima" <satoruf@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > can execute 'pg_dump', which produces an output file. However, when I > made it as a stored function in C, it didn't work. Within the stored > function, I used the exact same 'system' command. The other parts > within the function such as getting input values, calculating, and > returning outputs works and no error is produced. It looks that just > the system("pg_dump"); command is passed without outputting anything. > > Are you making any effort at all to check for errors? It's not apparent > from this code... > > The simplest approach to debugging this might be to dump stderr into > some file, say > > system("pg_dump -f /path/to/output/file database_name 2>/tmp/pgdumperrs"); > > and see what ends up in that file. > > Like, perhaps, the owner of the PostgreSQL server process having no > permission to write into /path/to/output/file? > > Cheers, > Steve > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly