I am trying to COPY a file into a table in PostgreSQL. The table owner is postgres and the file owner is postgres.
The file is in /tmp.
Still I am getting the error message:
could not open file "/tmp/file" for reading: Permission denied
I don't understand what I am doing wrong as all the posts I've found say that if I have the file in /tmp and owner is postgres then the COPY command should work.
A guess: You are using Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Scientific Linux, or one of the other distros that enable SELinux by default.
Either and on your particular OS/version the SELinux policies for PostgreSQL do not permit the server to read files outside the PostgreSQL data directory, or the file was created by a service covered by a targeted policy so it has a label that PostgreSQL isn't allowed to read from.
You can confirm whether or not this is the problem by running, as root:
setenforce 0
then re-testing. Run:
setenforce 1
to re-enable SELinux after testing. setenforce isn't permanent; SELinux will be automatically re-enabled on reboot anyway. Disabling SELinux permanently is not usually a good solution for issues like this; if you confirm the issue is SELinux it can be explored further.
Since you have not specified the OS or version you are using, the PostgreSQL version, the exact command you're running, ls -al on the file, \d+ on the table, etc, it's hard to give any more detail, or to know if this is more than a guess. Try updating your answer to include all that and an ls --lcontext of the file too.