psql prompts for user password despite PGPASSFILE var defined

Question

I have an environment variable PGPASSFILE declared pointing to the location of my .pgpass file.

>echo $PGPASSFILE
/somedir/.pgpass

As per this doc, the permission stamp of the file is proper to not expose the file to anyone else:

>ls -la /somedir
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2014-06-25 17:40 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 2014-06-25 16:37 ..
-rw------- 1 root root  354 2014-06-25 16:43 .pgpass
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   30 2014-06-25 16:37 .pgpass_path

The file looks about right:

  1 localhost:*:*:postgres:blabla
  2 localhost:*:somedb:somedb_master:blabla
  3 localhost:*:somedb:somedb_rw:blabla

However, when I try to invoke psql, it still prompts me for password:

>psql -h localhost -d somedb -U somedb_rw
Password for user somedb_rw:

The connection succeeds when I enter password but I shouldn't be prompted. Any idea what may be wrong? This is on Ubuntu 10.04 VM. On my Mac host, this same configuration works without prompting.

Marchant

From this example, it looks like you have a .pgpass in a directory named .pgpass? So, /somedir/.pgpass/.pgpass? If so, I think your $PGPASSFILE var needs to be updated. – Favourable

no, the var actually needs to point to the file, not the directory where it is – Marchant

Exactly. Your echo shows /somedir/.pgpass, but then you do a ls -la /somedir/.pgpass and it shows a file owned by root with the same name. – Favourable

Does this answer your question? postgresql: .pgpass not working – Guizot