postgresql where does the output of pg_dump go

Go to command prompt and directory postgresql\9.3\bin.

Example

.

..
    c:\Program files\postgresql\9.3\bin> pg_dump -h localhost -p 5432 -U postgres test > D:\backup.sql
...

After above command enter User "postgres" password and check D:\ drive for backup.sql file

In my situation (PostgreSQL 9.1.21, Centos 6.7), the command

runuser -l postgres -c 'pg_dump my_database > my_database.sql'

saved the file here:

/var/lib/pgsql/my_database.sql

Not sure if that is true for other Linux dists, CentOS and/or pgl versions. According to the answer post by the asker of this question, this is true, but other users said the backup file was in the current directory (a situation different of most people reading this thread, for obvious reasons). Well, I hope this can help other users with the same problem.

P.s.: if that's not the path for your situation, you can try (in Linux) to find it using the below command (as stated by @Bohemian in the comments of this question), but this can take a while:

find / -name 'my_database.sql'

EDIT: I tried to run the analogous command in Ubuntu 12.04 (it works on Ubuntu 18.04):

sudo -u postgres pg_dump my_database > my_database.sql

And in this case the file was saved in the current directory where I ran the command! So both cases can happen in Linux, depending of the specific dist you are working

I'm late to this party, but I feel that none of the answers are really correct. Most seem to imply that pg_dump writes a file somewhere. It doesn't. You are sending the output to a file, and you told the shell where to write that file.

In your example pg_dump test > backup.sql, which uses the plain or SQL format, the pg_dump command does not store any file anywhere. It just sends the output to STDOUT, which is usually your screen, and it's done.

But in your command, you also told your shell (Terminal, Command prompt, whatever) to redirect STDOUT to a file. This has nothing to do with pg_dump but is a standard feature of shells like Bash or cmd.exe.

You used > to redirect STDOUT to a file instead of the screen. And you gave the file name: "backup.sql". Since you didn't specify any path, the file will be in your current directory. This is probably your home directory, unless you have done a cd ... into some other directory.

In the particular case of pg_dump, you could also have used an alternative to the > /path/to/some_file shell redirection, by using the -f some_file option:

-f file
--file=file

Send output to the specified file. This parameter can be omitted for file based output formats, in which case the standard output is used.

So your command could have been pg_dump test -f backup.sql, asking pg_dump to write directly to that file.

But in any case, you give the file name, and if you don't specify a path, the file is created in your current directory. If your prompt doesn't already display your current directory, you can have it shown with the pwd command on Unix, and cd in Windows.