John DeSoi mentioned :
=> I'm not sure you can use \d directly, but if you startup psql with the
=> -E option it will show you all the SQL it is using to run the \d
=> command. It should be fairly easy to get the strings you need from the
=> results of running a similar query. The psql source is a good place to
=> look also.
Sometimes you just need to see things from a different perspective.
Thanks!
Here's my final solution that runs in less than a minute for +- 543 tables :
for x in $(psql -tc "select relname from pg_class where relkind = 'r' and relname not like 'pg_%'")
do
echo "$(psql -tc "select encode(digest('$(psql -c '\d '${x}'' mer9188_test | tr -d \"\'\")', 'md5'), 'hex')"
mer9188_test| grep -v "^$"|tr -d " "):${x}"
done > compare_list.lst
