Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> writes:
> On 6 March 2012 18:01, Adrian Klaver <adrian(dot)klaver(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> A thought, what if you do rm -rf * in the data directory?

> I've done that a couple times, but no effect. I think Tom's point
> about a filesystem bug is probably right.

Yeah, given your "touch" experiment I think that you have more than
enough ammunition to file a kernel bug. Apparently, the directory
contents are corrupted in such a way that a file named "postmaster.pid"
can be created but it's invisible to some (perhaps not all) operations.
In some of the more complex directory data structures I could believe
that this result is filename-sensitive (think corrupted hashtable...)

regards, tom lane