pg_dump: too many command line arguments

Question

what is wrong with this command:

pg_dump -U postgres -W admin --disable-triggers -a -t employees -f D:\ddd.txt postgres

This is giving error of too many command-line arguments

Solution 1

Looks like its the -W option. There is no value to go with that option.

-W, --password           force password prompt (should happen automatically)

If you want to run the command without typing is a password, use a .pgpass file. http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/libpq-pgpass.html

Solution 2

For posterity, note that pg_dump and pg_restore (and many other commands) cannot process long hyphens that word processors create. If you are cut-pasting command lines from a word processor, be sure it hasn't converted your hyphens to something else in editing. Else you will get command lines that look correct but hopelessly confuse the argument parsers in these tools.

Solution 3

pg_dump and pg_restore need to ask password on commandline, if you put it command, they always give "too many command-line arguments" error. You can use below for setting related environment variable in commandline or batch file:

"SET PGPASSWORD=<password>"

so that you are not asked to enter password manually in your batch file. They use given environment variable.

Solution 4

Instead of passing password with -W flag start with setting temporary variable for postgres:

PGPASSWORD="mypass" pg_dump -U postgres--disable-triggers -a -t employees -f D:\ddd.txt postgres

Solution 5

-W -> will prompt for a password to take full DB dump use some thing like

pg_dump -h 192.168.44.200 -p 5432 -U postgres -W -c -C -Fc -f C:\MMM\backup10_3.backup DATABASE_NAME

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Comments

[Daniel Vérité]

@BhargavGor: omit -W admin, not just -W

[i0x539]

This was so tech. It saved me from writing from a terrible me expect/spawn bash script. Thank you.

[mangonights]

dude, i'd fking kiss if you were here! lol. watch out for TextEdit auto-correct

[wmassingham]

Stupid problems... I had -jobs instead of --jobs.

[VSO]

This helped me.

[juckele]

This should be the accepted answer. The other answers are simply solving typos.

[Nirmal Seneviratne]

This worked, but needed single quotation for "mypass".