Adding my resolution, incase it helps anyone. I installed postgis but the error wasn't resolved. The --inserts option was not feasible as I had to copy a big schema having tables with thousands of rows. For the same database I didn't see this issue when pg_dump and psql (restore) were run on mac. But the issue came when pg_dump was run on linux machine, the dump file copied to mac and tried for restore. So I opened the dump file in VSCode. It detected unusual line terminators and gave option to remove them. After doing that the dump file restore ran without the invalid command \N errors.

当我试图从二进制pg_dump恢复时，我收到了相同的错误消息。我简单地使用pg_restore来恢复我的转储，并完全避免\N错误，例如。

pg_restore -c -F t -F your.backup.tar

开关说明:

-f, --file=FILENAME      output file name
-F, --format=c|d|t       backup file format (should be automatic)
-c, --clean              clean (drop) database objects before recreating

我的解决办法是:

psql -U your_user your_db < your.file.here.sql  2>&1|more

这样我就可以读取错误消息

我希望这能对大家有所帮助。

对于我在SUSE 12上使用postgreSQL 10，我通过增加磁盘空间解决了无效命令\N错误。磁盘空间不足导致了我的错误。如果查看df -h输出中数据将要进入的文件系统，就可以判断是否耗尽了磁盘空间。如果文件系统/mount的使用率为100%，在执行类似psql -f db. mount的操作后。对于postgres(请参阅https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/app-pg-dumpall.html)，您可能需要增加可用的磁盘空间。

大多数时候，解决方案是安装postgres-contrib包。

In my recent experience, it's possible to get this error when the real problem has nothing to do with escape characters or newlines. In my case, I had created a dump from database A with pg_dump -a -t table_name > dump.sql and was trying to restore it to database B with psql < dump.sql (after updating the proper env vars, of course) What I finally figured out was that the dump, though it was data-only (the -a option, so that the table structure isn't explicitly part of the dump), was schema-specific. That meant that without manually modifying the dump, I couldn't use a dump generated from schema1.table_name to populate schema2.table_name. Manually modifying the dump was easy, the schema is specified in the first 15 lines or so.