John Iliffe <john(dot)iliffe(at)iliffe(dot)ca> writes:
> When the programme exited it left another postmaster.pid file so I deleted
> that one too.
You haven't shown us the program actually exiting, and basically the only
way to get the postmaster to exit without removing its pid file is to
kill -9 it. Now I am suspicious that you in fact haven't killed any
postmasters, but only removed their pidfiles out from under them, which is
an incredibly dangerous thing to do. Check "ps ax" output to see if any
postgres processes are lurking in background.
regards, tom lane