Re: Select works only when connected from login postgres

Joseph Brenner <doomvox(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I'm trying to get a new build of 9.6.1 working on Debian
> stable and I'm seeing some odd behavior where things work
> correctly if I run psql when logged in as user 'postgres',
> but if I'm logged-in as user 'doom' (my usual login), I don't
> seem to have any select privileges. Even this fails
> silently:

> select 'world' as hello;

Um, define "fails silently"? Do you get a command prompt from
psql? What does the interaction look like *exactly*? If psql
just returns to the shell command prompt, maybe it's giving a
nonzero exit code? (try "echo $?" afterwards)

[ and later... ]

> The only thing unusual about the steps that I followed was I built
> with port 5433 (rather than 5432) as the default,

This is not as simple as it might look; the default port is actually
wired into libpq.so, not psql itself. And on most brands of Linuxen,
it's not that easy to get a program to link to a non-default copy of
a shared library if there's a copy in /usr/lib. However, if you were
connecting to the wrong port number, I'd still not expect that it
just dies without saying anything.

Hmm ... a different take on that is that maybe psql is crashing
because it's linking to an ABI-incompatible libpq. You should try
"ldd" on the psql executable and see if it's resolving the libpq
dependency to the copy you intended.

regards, tom lane