How to pass in password to pg_dump?
Create a .pgpass file in the home directory of the account that pg_dump will run as.
The format is:
hostname:port:database:username:passwordThen, set the file's mode to 0600. Otherwise, it will be ignored.
chmod 600 ~/.pgpassSee the Postgresql documentation libpq-pgpass for more details.
Or you can set up crontab to run a script. Inside that script you can set an environment variable like this:export PGPASSWORD="$put_here_the_password"
This way if you have multiple commands that would require password you can put them all in the script. If the password changes you only have to change it in one place (the script).
And I agree with Joshua, using pg_dump -Fc generates the most flexible export format and is already compressed. For more info see: pg_dump documentation
E.g.
# dump the database in custom-format archivepg_dump -Fc mydb > db.dump# restore the databasepg_restore -d newdb db.dump
If you want to do it in one command:
PGPASSWORD="mypass" pg_dump mydb > mydb.dump