Shell script to dump contents of bytea column to a file
Please note that bytea columns, in pg 9.0 and above, display as hex, with an irritating leading '\x', which can be removed using pg's substring funciton.
#!/bin/bash set -e set -u psql \ -P t \ -P format=unaligned \ -X \ -U myuser \ -h myhost \ -c "select substring(my_bytea_col::text from 3) from my_table where id = 12" \ mydb \ | xxd -r -p > dump.txt