pgpass not used?

[jevansbio]

The documentation states that if certain arguments are NULL, a .pgpass or pgpass.conf file will be used to get the username and password. However I don't seem to be able to make this work, even when explicitly setting the passfile argument when making the connection.

R can definitely find the file just fine, and I suppose I could resort to manually loading the file. However I am unsure as to why this seems to fail.

I have other clients on the same system that use the pgpass method of authentication with no trouble.

Is this a bug, or am I missing something?