Mr. Lane and Mr. Momjian,
Well, I asked and I got an answer. So be it. Regarding how I concluded that PGPASSFILE was deprecated for pg_dump, I offer the following.
1. The documentation for pg_dump in the manual (Section VI) includes a section labeled "Environment". This lists PGDATABASE, PGHOST, PGPORT, and PGUSER. It also says "default connection parameters" but there is no hyperlink or reference to another manual section to explain/define this term.
2. Neither the Index nor the Table of Contents has an entry for "connection parameters" or "default connection parameters".
3. The application help (pg_dump --help) provides no further information.
4. The pg_dump documentation in Section VI has a "See Also" section, with a link to 29.12. In 29.12 there is a list of variables that "can be used to select default connection parameters" for PQconnectdb, PQsetdbLogin, and PQsetdb (no mention of pg_dump). The list includes those mentioned in the pg_dump documentation () see 1 above) along with several others (including PGPASSFILE). I was left wondering why would some of these be mentioned in the pg_dump section and not the others? Perhaps those not mentioned can't be used by pg_dump?
Given the above ambiguities, I was not able to conclude that pg_dump would accept the PGPASSFILE environment variable.
Michael Schmidt
