If you have a PostgreSQL dump in the custom format you can can view the text format dump (plain SQL statements).

PostgreSQL 12 and newer

Write it as a textdump to a file:

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pg_restore $dumpname -f name.textdump

Applying parameters

You can apply the same parameters for the output of the textdump as for restoring the dump (for e.g. --clean to drop database objects before recreating them):

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pg_restore --clean $dumpname -f $name.textdump

PostgreSQL 11 and older

You can output the contents to STDOUT and redirect it to a file:

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pg_restore $dumpname > $name.textdump