PostgreSQL – dump each table into a different file

I need to extract SQL files from multiple tables of a PostgreSQL database. This is what I’ve come up with so far:

pg_dump -t 'thr_*' -s dbName -U userName > /home/anik/psqlTest/db_dump.sql

However, as you see, all the tables that start with the prefix thr are being exported to a single unified file (db_dump.sql). I have almost 90 tables in total to extract SQL from, so it is a must that the data be stored into separate files.

How can I do it? Thanks in advance.

Answer

If you are happy to hard-code the list of tables, but just want each to be in a different file, you could use a shell script loop to run the pg_dump command multiple times, substituting in the table name each time round the loop:

for table in table1 table2 table3 etc;
do pg_dump -t $table -U userName dbName > /home/anik/psqlTest/db_dump_dir/$table.sql;
done;

EDIT: This approach can be extended to get the list of tables dynamically by running a query through psql and feeding the results into the loop instead of a hard-coded list:

for table in $(psql -U userName -d dbName -t -c "Select table_name From information_schema.tables Where table_type='BASE TABLE' and table_name like 'thr_%'");
do pg_dump -t $table -U userName dbName > /home/anik/psqlTest/db_dump_dir/$table.sql;
done;

Here psql -t -c "SQL" runs SQL and outputs the results with no header or footer; since there is only one column selected, there will be a table name on each line of the output captured by $(command), and your shell will loop through them one at a time.