Opening it in VIM brings up a binary file (compressed, sure) but it looks like this:
Which contains the line "DROP DATABASE". Which is weird-- it does not drop the database, I mean, I restored from the same file. Why is this in there?
Doing a text dump w/o -Fc yields a text file with no DROP statement.
The whole point of the custom format - which indeed defaults to compressed mode (read the docs) - is to move any decisions about what to do during restoring to the pg_restore commands. So, if the restore wants to drop the database it has a drop database command available which it can execute. If it doesn't that command will simply be skipped.
-Fp is a plain text format meant to be run via psql (or any other program that can execute a basic SQL script - again, see the docs). Such a program is not expected to specify restore conditions so whatever was defined during the pg_dump will simply take effect.
