• Query regarding psql command

    From ajat.prabha.leo@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Thu May 24 23:34:23 2018
    Hi there,
    I'm an undergrad student and very new to postgresql. I have a question to which I haven't been able to find an answer yet.
    I installed postgresql and ran the command `psql -U postgres` and as expected it failed because the role doesn't exist.

    But when I tried to run `psql postgres`, it worked! My question is why is this command working? I've not been able to find this command anywhere in the documentation.

    Now, I also created the role postgres and both commands are working.

    Note: when I run `psql postgres` the logged-in user is the superuser to OS. I'm doing this on High Sierra.

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  • From Laurenz Albe@21:1/5 to ajat.prabha.leo on Fri May 25 11:05:59 2018
    On Thu, 24 May 2018 23:34:23 -0700, ajat.prabha.leo wrote:
    I'm an undergrad student and very new to postgresql. I have a question
    to which I haven't been able to find an answer yet.
    I installed postgresql and ran the command `psql -U postgres` and as
    expected it failed because the role doesn't exist.

    But when I tried to run `psql postgres`, it worked! My question is why
    is this command working? I've not been able to find this command
    anywhere in the documentation.

    Now, I also created the role postgres and both commands are working.

    Note: when I run `psql postgres` the logged-in user is the superuser to
    OS. I'm doing this on High Sierra.

    It must be that your installation process named the default superuser differently when it ran "initdb" to create the cluster.

    You can use this query to find the name of the default superuser:

    SELECT usename FROM pg_user WHERE usesysid = 10;

    Your attempt with "psql postgres" succeeded because the default superuser happened to have the same name as your operating system user, and that's
    the default that psql uses if you don't specify the -U option.

    You can rename a user with

    ALTER USER ... RENAME TO ...;

    But you shouldn't forget that renaming a user clears the password, so you
    have to set it again with \password.

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  • From ajat.prabha.leo@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Fri May 25 05:25:10 2018
    Thank you Laurenz for the help 🙂

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