Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

On 6 March 2012 19:28, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> writes:
>> On 6 March 2012 18:20, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> Still, I agree with your point: Thom should reboot and see if the
>>> misbehavior is still there, because that would be useful info for his
>>> bug report.
>
>> After a reboot, initdb completes successfully.  I don't think it
>> performed an fsck of any kind as I don't see it in the logs.
>
> Fascinating.  So maybe there is something to Bosco's theory of something
> holding open the old pidfile.  But what would that be?  The postmaster
> doesn't hold it open, just write it and close it.

No idea. I did run an lsof while the problem was still present and
grep'd for the directory as I too suspected there may be some process
thinking it still had a reference to the file, but there were no
matches.

--
Thom