Re: hard shutdown of system

"surabhi.ahuja" <surabhi(dot)ahuja(at)iiitb(dot)ac(dot)in> writes:
> the user tries to do kill -9 -1 and log in again

The *first* thing you gotta do is retrain your user. kill -9
is never the appropriate way to shut down the postmaster.

The script mods you describe seem to be oriented at forcing the
postmaster to restart when there are still live child processes
of the old postmaster. That is a REALLY BAD IDEA. It will lead
to unrecoverable corruption of your database. The safety checks
that are in the postmaster are there to keep you from destroying
your database --- overriding them by removing the pid file is
not safe, recommended, or supported.

The last question is why your user wants to shut down the postmaster
so often? There shouldn't be any need for that in ordinary scenarios.

regards, tom lane