Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

On Tuesday, March 06, 2012 8:44:10 am Thom Brown wrote:

> >> And if I start my development copy, this is the content of its
> >> postmaster.pid:
> >>
> >> 27061
> >> /home/thom/Development/data
> >> 1331050950
> >> 5488
> >> /tmp
> >> localhost
> >> 5488001 191365126
> >
> > So how are getting the file above? I thought initdb refused to init the
> > directory and that you could not find pid file it was referring to? Just
> > on a hunch, what is in /tmp?
>
> I got the above output when I created a new data directory and initdb'd it.

Still not understanding. In your original post you said
/home/thom/Development/data was the original directory you could not initdb. How
could it also be the new directory you can initdb as indicated by the
postmaster.pid?

From your previous post:
thom(at)swift:~/Development$ pg_ctl stop
pg_ctl: could not send stop signal (PID: 2807): No such process

Doing the above without qualifying which version of pg_ctl you are using or what
data directory you are pointing is dangerous. The combination of implied
pathing and preset env variables could lead to all sorts of mischief.

>
> /tmp shows:
>
> 4 -rw------- 1 thom thom 55 2012-03-06 16:22
> .s.PGSQL.5488.lock
> 0 srwxrwxrwx 1 thom thom 0 2012-03-06 16:22
> .s.PGSQL.5488
>
> Once it's up and running. These disappear after though. When using
> the old data directory again, there's no evidence of anything like
> this in /tmp.

--
Adrian Klaver
adrian(dot)klaver(at)gmail(dot)com