Don't forget to de-escape the password field in .pgpass.

robertmhaas · robertmhaas · commit 8d15e3ec4fcb · 2011-12-22T13:02:57.000-05:00
This has been broken just about forever (or more specifically, commit 7f4981f) and nobody noticed until Richard Huxton reported it recently. Analysis and fix by Ross Reedstrom, although I didn't use his patch. This doesn't seem important enough to back-patch and is mildly backward incompatible, so I'm just doing this in master.
diff --git a/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c b/src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c
@@ -4904,7 +4904,9 @@ PasswordFromFile(char *hostname, char *port, char *dbname, char *username)
 	while (!feof(fp) && !ferror(fp))
 	{
 		char	   *t = buf,
-				   *ret;
+				   *ret,
+				   *p1,
+				   *p2;
 		int			len;
 
 		if (fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), fp) == NULL)
@@ -4925,6 +4927,16 @@ PasswordFromFile(char *hostname, char *port, char *dbname, char *username)
 			continue;
 		ret = strdup(t);
 		fclose(fp);
+
+		/* De-escape password. */
+		for (p1 = p2 = ret; *p1 != ':' && *p1 != '\0'; ++p1, ++p2)
+		{
+			if (*p1 == '\\' && p1[1] != '\0')
+				++p1;
+			*p2 = *p1;
+		}
+		*p2 = '\0';
+
 		return ret;
 	}
 
