Alternate DB location continued.

Hi again all.
Here is the situation:
Fedora Core 3 with all updates.
PostgreSQL 8.0.1 installed - no tables to update.
In /etc/profile I have declared:
PGDATA=/pg_data
PATH=$PATH:$PGDATA
export PGDATA
export PATH

Directory /pg_data exists and is owned by postgres.
Log in as user postgres and run initdb by itself or with
-D PGDATA
-D /pg_data

The output is as follows:
The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user
"postgres?.
This user must also own the server process.
The database cluster will be initialized with local en_US.UTF-8.
The default database encoding has accordingly been set to UNICODE.

fixing permissions on existing directory /pg_data . . . ok
creating directory /pg_data/global ... ok
creating directory /pg_data/pg_xlog ... ok
creating directory /pg_data/pg_xlog/archive_status ... ok
creating directory /pg_data/pg_clog ... ok
creating directory /pg_data/pg_subtrans ... ok
creating directory /pg_data/base ... ok
creating directory /pg_data/base/1 ... ok
creating directory /pg_data/pb_tblspc ... ok
selecting default max_connections ... 10
selecting default shared_buffers ... 50
creating configuration files ... ok
creating template1 database in /pg_data/base/1 ... child process
exited with exit code 1
initdb: removing contents of data directory "/pg_data"

Does anyone have any idea of where I went wrong? If do not declare and
export PGDATA or append it to path, everything works fine.

Thanks again for your time. If you responded the other day I may have
lost your message as I was on the road.

Bob Hartung