In addition to being able to submit raw SQL queries to the server via psql you can also take advantage of the psql meta-commands to obtain information from the server. Meta-Commands. psql is the standard PostgreSQL application to work with databases; It uses a superset of standard SQL; It can be interactively like DBaccess, or in scripts like sqlcmd; Common psql Command Line Options-A, –no-align: set output to non-aligned, no padding-c sql, –command sql: execute the sql command and then exit This set of commands is taken from the psql command-line tool. For example:alias postygresy='psql --host hostname database_name -U username' The values should match those that you inputted to the ~/.pgpass file. $ psql -U sampleuser -h localhost A line starting with # represents a comment. Source your bash profile with . A basic working knowledge of database management systems and SQL commands for the psql PostgreSQL interface. Psql is the interactive terminal for working with Postgres. * Bash is a “Unix shell”: a command-line interface for interacting with the operating system. In this tutorial, you will learn how to connect to PostgreSQL from the command line using psql or pgAdmin. That way SQL and psql commands can be freely mixed on a line. Tables are an example for relations. I recently started to create UNIX / LINUX Bash Shell script for enhancing my PostgreSQL DBA Work. Psql Tweet What is psql. Now that you have Postgres installed, open the psql as − Program Files → PostgreSQL 9.2 → SQL Shell(psql). Prompt 2 is issued when more input is expected during command entry, for example because the command was not terminated with a semicolon or a quote was not closed. Prompt 1 is the normal prompt that is issued when psql requests a new command. It has the ability to run an entire script of commands, known as a “Bash shell script”. In the following example, we have run \d command on mydb database. In this tutorial, we will learn how to answer these key questions from the command line using psql. On Windows it might look like C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL> but Windows prompts are also configurable. )-l: psql will list all databases and then exit (useful if the user you connect with doesn't has a default database, like at AWS RDS); Most \d commands support additional param of __schema__.name__ and accept wildcards like *. It listed all the available relations. But in any case, the arguments of a meta-command cannot continue beyond the end of the line. Theres an abundance of flags available for use when working with psql, but lets focus on some of the most important ones, then how to connect:-h the host to connect to-U the user to connect with-p the port to connect to (default is 5432) It provides a visual, user-friendly environment with a host of practical solutions that make managing databases easy. The $ starting a command line in the examples below represents your operating system prompt. Create an alias in your bash profile that runs your psql command for you. This psql command is used to describe available relations in the database. Prompts are configurable so it may well not look like this. share | improve this answer | follow | $ psql thegeekstuff psql (9.6.1) Type "help" for help. Use psql to edit, automate, and execute queries in PostgreSQL. Type your alias from the command line. psql. Using psql, you can generate a complete list of commands by using the \help command. For the syntax of a specific command, use the following command − pgAdmin is a web interface for managing PostgreSQL databases. First, you should connect to the newly created “thegeekstuff” database using the psql command as shown below. thegeekstuff=# Note: The above command will take you to the postgreSQL prompt “=#”. 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