Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

On 6 March 2012 18:01, Adrian Klaver <adrian(dot)klaver(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 06, 2012 9:53:52 am Tom Lane wrote:
>> Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> writes:
>> > /home/thom/Development/data was causing problems so:
>> >
>> > mv data databroken
>> > mkdir data
>> > initdb
>> >
>> > ... working fine again.  I then used the postmaster.pid from this when
>> > started up.  But if I do:
>> >
>> > pg_ctl stop
>> > rm -rf data
>> > mv databroken data
>> > initdb
>> >
>> > ... error messages appear again.
>>
>> Okay, so the question becomes: what is different between databroken and
>> a freshly mkdir'd empty directory?  If there is no visible difference in
>> contents, ownership, or permissions, then it seems like this is evidence
>> of a filesystem bug (ie, apparently empty directory acts nonempty for
>> some operations).
>
> 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.

--
Thom