Also, I came upon this gem:
$ echo '\\copy test to stdout' | psql -o /tmp/z test 444 444 444 444 444
Seems 'copy to stdout' also has this split idea of sending \copy output to a different place from other output.
I guess my big question now is why someone would use \copy stdin/stdout for reading input from the command stream when they can use COPY?
I think the idea was that you could have a program that does something like (Perl):
my $fh = open('| psql -f commands.sql');
print $fh "1\ta\n";Where commands.sql contains the \copy.
I'm not saying that was the original intention, but someone pointed out you could do things that way, and I can see it might (rarely) be useful.
-- Richard Huxton Archonet Ltd
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TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your
joining column's datatypes do not match
