diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml index 7ed20e4dd9a..94635c56ce9 100644 --- a/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml +++ b/doc/src/sgml/ref/psql-ref.sgml @@ -83,14 +83,15 @@ PostgreSQL documentation (psqlrc and ~/.psqlrc) are ignored with this option. - command must be either + + command must be either a command string that is completely parsable by the server (i.e., it contains no psql-specific features), or a single backslash command. Thus you cannot mix SQL and psql meta-commands with this option. To achieve that, you could - pipe the string into psql, like - this: echo '\x \\ SELECT * FROM foo;' | psql. + pipe the string into psql, for example: + echo '\x \\ SELECT * FROM foo;' | psql. (\\ is the separator meta-command.) @@ -102,6 +103,19 @@ PostgreSQL documentation psql's standard input. Also, only the result of the last SQL command is returned. + + Because of these legacy behaviors, putting more than one command in + the string often has unexpected results. It's + better to feed multiple commands to psql's + standard input, either using echo as + illustrated above, or via a shell here-document, for example: + +psql <<EOF +\x +SELECT * FROM foo; +EOF + +