kill `ps auxww | grep 'postgres: postgres <database>' | grep -v 'grep' | perl -F"\s+" -ane 'print "$F[1] ";'`
Basically, this takes a process listing, finds all entries corresponding to connections to the target database, excludes the calling command, then isolates the pids using Perl.
If you replace <database> with the name of the database you're trying to drop, this should kill all backends connected to that database. This seems to work under Debian, but it's certainly not terribly portable or secure. Also, I'd like to avoid relying on Perl, but I couldn't figure out how to use cut since pids are variable length. Finally, this doesn't prevent new connections from cropping up in a high-traffic environment.
Ideally, such a process would do this in a portable fashion:
1. Disable incoming connections. 2. Kill current connections
The way I know of to do this would be to generate a temporary pg_hba.conf file specifically to switch to single-user mode. Move that into place. Then kill the connections. Then perform whatever action is necessary (in this case, dropping the database). Then restore the original pg_hba.conf file.
I'm curious, though, too, to know whether anyone has anything more sophisticated.
-tfo
-- Thomas F. O'Connell Co-Founder, Information Architect Sitening, LLC http://www.sitening.com/ 110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6 Nashville, TN 37203-6320 615-260-0005
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