I have a shell script that is being called from php.

the shell script needs to execute a sql command using psql . www-data is the user that calls the script, but I need to run the psql as a different user and password.

the script basically runs this:


echo 'Select * from farms;' >> /tmp/x.sql
psql -U joe -d mydb -f /tmp/x.sql > /tmp/log.txt

obviously, this will not work because the password for account joe cannot be found. So I have tried and tried to set the PGPASSWORD. I can even run export PGPASSWORD=thepassword and then printenv and see it there. But it fails when I try it saying:

psql: FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "joe"


in troubleshooting, I sudo bash'd over to root and tried this at the command line:

export PGPASSWORD=thepassword
psql -U joe -d mydb -f /tmp/x.sql > /tmp/log.txt
--- same error, failed to authenticate.

I also loaded up all of the variables and checked them with printenv:
PGPORT, PGDATABASE, PGUSER, PGPASSWORD, PGHOST . It still says "ident authentication failed".

I can log into this account joe in various ways so I know the password is good.

Any advice will be quite appreciated.