.pgpass with postgreSQL not working

I have put a .pgpass file in /folder/.pgpass and it looks like this

*:*:*:postgres:password_for_postgres

I have a bash script where I backup the database from postgreSQL:

#!/bin/bash
export PGPASSFILE=/folder/.pgpass
echo $PGPASSFILE
pg_dump --username=postgres --format=c --file=/backup/db/db.sqlc database

However, the script still promts me for the password. PGPASSFILE has the value as it should, as far as I can see. Any hints on what the problem might be?

/K

Is the pgpass file set to mode 0600 (i.e. read/write only by the owner)? The client library will ignore it if it's group- or world-readable.

On my configuration (Ubuntu 10.04.3 and PostgreSQL 8.4), I could finally get it to work when the username I am logged in is the same as the one I'm trying to get a password from the .pgpass file for.

Logged in as deployer, I was trying to use the .pgpass file to access the database owned by an user name appname, which has no Unix user equivalent. I could not make the .pgpass work, until I started using deployer as the user to access my database...

Here is my /home/deployer/.pgpass file content:

*:*:*:deployer:password

Here a part of the /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_hba.conf one:

# TYPE  DATABASE    USER        CIDR-ADDRESS          METHOD                                                

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only                                                        
local   all         all                               md5                                                   
# IPv4 local connections:                                                                                   
host    all         all         127.0.0.1/32          md5                                                   
host    all         all         192.168.0.1/32        md5                                                   
# IPv6 local connections:                                                                                   
host    all         all         ::1/128               md5 

As you can see, all my connections requires password (md5).

With this configuration, assuming I have a database I created with this command:

deployer@ubuntu-server:~$ createdb -T template0 -O deployer -E UTF8 dbname

I'm able to perform the following operation without entering a password:

deployer@ubuntu-server:~$ dropdb dbname

As soon as I change the name of my .pgpass to .pgpass-no, it will require a password.

BTW, do not forget that your .pgpass file must be under 0600 permissions:

deployer@ubuntu-server:~$ ls -la .pgpass
-rw------- 1 deployer staff 24 2012-01-06 17:29 .pgpass