Hi Gabriele, This isn’t strictly a psql problem, but please humor me.
I can do below from linux prompt: $ echo "select marker, p, afreq from gallo.fbat_sdsdecode limit 10" | \ > psql -P 'format=unaligned' -P 'fieldsep=,' -t -f - musket And get: RS3094315,0.578121,0.735 RS3094315,0.578121,0.265 RS3115850,0.365978,0.251 RS3115850,0.365978,0.749 RS12562034,,0.135 RS12562034,,0.865 RS4475691,0.247133,0.710 RS4475691,0.247133,0.290 RS28705211,,0.725 RS28705211,,0.275 But when I do this: $ echo "select marker, p, afreq from gallo.fbat_sdsdecode limit 10" | \ > psql -P 'format=unaligned' -P 'fieldsep=\t' -t -f - musket (here the only change from the previous is the specification of fieldsep) Then I get: RS3094315\t0.578121\t0.735 RS3094315\t0.578121\t0.265 RS3115850\t0.365978\t0.251 RS3115850\t0.365978\t0.749 RS12562034\t\t0.135 RS12562034\t\t0.865 RS4475691\t0.247133\t0.710 RS4475691\t0.247133\t0.290 RS28705211\t\t0.725 RS28705211\t\t0.275 What's denoted as \t is not a tab character. It is a two character sequence backslash followd by a t. I have tried all other possibilities such as \\t , "\t", etc that I can think of, but I cannot get an honest to god tab character to appear as field separator. I can do it from psql and achieve what I want, but I need to do this from shell level. Any suggestion what else I can try? Regards, Tena Sakai tsa...@gallo.ucsf.edu On 5/30/10 1:37 AM, "Gabriele Bartolini" <gabriele.bartol...@2ndquadrant.it> wrote: > Tena Sakai ha scritto: >> Can somebody please tell me what “|” is called in my example above? >> And is it possible to change it from “|” to something else for >> display purpose? > The field separatore in psql is used only when the format is "unaligned" > (which does not happen to be default). > > In order for it to be effective, you need to type in psql: > > \pset format unaligned > \pset fieldsep '\t' > > This will give you an output with columns that are separated by tab. > > However, I suggest that you look at the documentation for more options > and ways to achive the same results: > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/app-psql.html > > Cheers, > Gabriele