Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

On 6 March 2012 16:31, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> writes:
>> On 6 March 2012 16:02, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> Um ... I assume this is some patched version rather than pristine
>>> sources?  It's pretty hard to explain why it's falling over like that.
>
>> No, I did a "git stash", "git clean -f" and "git pull" before trying to build.
>
> [ scratches head... ]  I can't reproduce it with current git tip.

And I don't think I can reproduce this if I remove that directory.
I've seen this issue about 3 or 4 times in the past, and fixed it by
ditching the old data dir completely. I'm just not sure what causes
this to happen.

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

Postgres wouldn't shut down. I had no other terminal windows using
psql, no other database client apps open, yet it stayed shutting down,
so I CTRL+C'd it and tried again. A quick check of running processes
showed that it had stopped running. (it shows postgres running above,
but the dev copy runs as my user, not postgres)

--
Thom