hmmm... Several things out of this:
a) Since till now in my development environment the database and the webserver are in the same machine, I never met problems with COPY (except the superuser limitation). But, if I continue using it (COPY), do I gather right from your comments that it will not work on my production environment (where db and web are on different machines)?
And this would be solved (as the superuser limitation) with \copy ?
b) Yes, I will handle them seperatelly at some point. But the way I am doing it with this new "import shell", the import itself is one quick step. Then each record I handle, gets "tagged" as "done" or with an error message. When I handle the individual records, I dont' care if the process stops in the middle for any reason (which was happening with the imports till now because of a server down or whatever), because I always know which records have been processed and which not. Also, if for any reason I want to stop an import in the middle, I also can do it easily, and resume etc.