e-letter, 18.10.2011 14:18:
> No interface, using command terminal to enter sql commands.
>
> The csv file of data is not ordered in any way, so I expect the
> command '\copy' to import data into a table without changing the
> relative positions of data.
>
That is a wrong assumption. There is no inherent order of the rows in a table.
Even straight after an insert the order of rows is not guaranteed to be the order in which they were inserted.
The only way to get a defined sort order is to use an ORDER BY clause when SELECTing the data.
Thomas