Supercharge Your Script with psql -c 🥞

Want to execute a PostgreSQL command from the command line? You can! The --command or -c flag takes a string argument that will be executed on your database of choice.

I've been using it as part of a script that creates a remote database backup, downloads the backup, drops and creates a local database, dumps the database backup into the local database, and then runs a select statement on the dataset. That final command looks like this (query has been simplified):

$ psql -d tilex_prod_backup -c "select count(*) from posts";

 count
-------
  2311
(1 row)