Sebastien Boisvert <sebastienboisvert(at)yahoo(dot)com> writes:
> I vaguely remember reading in the release notes (around the time 9.x was released) something about it automatically clearing out the postmaster.pid file if it was found to be stale/invalid when starting the the database server, however I cannot find any reference to this anymore.
It's always done that.
We occasionally see startup scripts that "helpfully" remove the .pid
file. They are, without exception, wrong and dangerous. The postmaster
is much more likely to get this right by itself.
regards, tom lane