pg_ctl

I briefly reviewed the alpha version of this that Joshua posted a URL to
(after converting all the c++ style comments and running through
pgindent so I could read it).

I endorse Neil's and Bruce's comments. In addition, I noticed these things:

. on Win32 a start op is guaranteed to hang unless I'm misreading the
code, as it is not backgrounded. Calling system() won't work here - I
think we'll have to call CreateProcess() on Win32.
. what about devnull processing on Win32?
. multi-line literals are apparently illegal (see recent hackers
thread?) and rejected by some compilers - use the fact that the compiler
will concatentate adjacent string literals.
. there is a lot of incorrect code that tries to do things that are
already done correctly and portably in initdb.c - e.g. finding the
postmaster executable.
. calling fopen() to check existence of a file is, er, suboptimal. Use
stat().
. no error checking on malloc() calls
. calling free() on these tiny strings is quite unnecessary - the
program should use minimal memory and have a very short life span. It's
just useless clutter IMNSHO.

This isn't an exhaustive list.

I suspect this work is actually a bit premature, and would best be done
after we have a working Win32 postmaster. After all, you can happily run
postgres without ever calling pg_ctl - it's a convenience rather than an
absolute necessity (unlike initdb). On Windows, production users
probably wouldn't use it at all - they would use the service manager, I
should think.

cheers

andrew