<ghaverla@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca> writes:
> I'm running Debian unstable, and I keep getting a message from a
> cron job that wants to do.maintenance about no password being
> supplied.
> Now, I gather in the past a person had to explicitly put a
> password in the cron job, but we are now supposed to use a file
> called ~/.pgpass (~ being /var/lib/postgres).
That is the recommended solution, but I'll bet that the cron job is not
running with the same value of $HOME that you think it is, and so it is
failing to find the file. You might want to explicitly set $HOME in the
script.
Also, test the .pgpass file by manually running psql with it; if there
is something wrong with the file contents you'll be able to prove it...
regards, tom lane