Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

On 6 March 2012 17:16, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> writes:
>> Looking back through my terminal log, one thing might lend a clue from
>> before I tried rebuliding it:
>
>> thom(at)swift:~/Development$ pg_ctl stop
>> waiting for server to shut down....cd .postgre.s
>> .............
>> ....
>
>
>
>> ....^C
>> thom(at)swift:~/Development$ pg_ctl stop
>> pg_ctl: could not send stop signal (PID: 2807): No such process
>> thom(at)swift:~/Development$ ps -ef | grep postgres
>> postgres  1199     1  0 Mar04 ?        00:00:01
>> /usr/lib/postgresql/9.1/bin/postgres -D /var/lib/postgresql/9.1/main
>> -c config_file=/etc/postgresql/9.1/main/postgresql.conf
>> postgres  1273  1199  0 Mar04 ?        00:00:18 postgres: writer
>> process
>> postgres  1274  1199  0 Mar04 ?        00:00:14 postgres: wal writer
>> process
>> postgres  1275  1199  0 Mar04 ?        00:00:03 postgres: autovacuum
>> launcher process
>> postgres  1276  1199  0 Mar04 ?        00:00:02 postgres: stats
>> collector process
>> thom     16476  4302  0 15:30 pts/1    00:00:00 grep --color=auto postgres
>
> Hm.  It looks like pg_ctl found a PID file pointing to a non-existent
> process, which is a bit like what you're seeing initdb do.
>
> I wonder whether this is somehow caused by conflicting settings for
> PGDATA.  Do you have a setting for that in your environment, or .bashrc
> or someplace, that is different from what you're trying to use?

These are in my env output:

PATH=/home/thom/Development/psql/bin/:/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
PGDATA=/home/thom/Development/data/
PGPORT=5488

This appears in my build script before configure:

export PGDATA=$HOME/Development/data/
export PATH=$HOME/Development/psql/bin/:$PATH
export PGPORT=5488

And those 3 lines also appear in my .bashrc file without any variation:

export PGDATA=$HOME/Development/data/
export PATH=$HOME/Development/psql/bin/:$PATH
export PGPORT=5488

--
Thom