Re: BUG #7559: syslogger doesn't close stdout and stderr

On Thu, 20 Sep 2012 at 10:31, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

> I believe Tom is referring to the removal of silent_mode in 9.2, see
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2011-06/msg00796.php
> and
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-06/msg02156.php.
> "We removed logic associated with daemonization" meant that the
> logic was removed from postmaster, because the preferred way to do
> it is by calling "pg_ctl start". pg_ctl redirects to /dev/null as
> you'd expect.

Well, I was involved in that discussion and as a consequence stopped
using silent_mode in the SUSE RPMs. That's what triggered the problem
and I just verified that it still exists on 9.2.

After starting PostgreSQL with pg_init, stdout and stderr of all
processes are pipes to the logger (as intended), but the logger itself
still has FDs 1 and 2 open as inherited from pg_init. I think
requiring the caller of pg_init to redirect them is not practical,
because then pg_init itself can't give feedback to the user. So it has
to be done either in pg_init or in the logger when those channels
aren't needed anymore. I'd prefer doing it in the logger, because the
code for it is already there and so that it also works when starting
PostgreSQL without using pg_init.

I've attached the patch I sent to Peter which applies to 9.1 and 9.2.

It also fixes a problem with the reopening of stdout and stderr from
/dev/null where the temporary FD must not be closed if it is either 1
or 2, which is quite likely to happen as we've just closed these two
and open() typically gets the lowest unused FD number.

BTW, I think the other dup2() for stderr in syslogger.c should get
such a check as well, even if the clash is less likely to happen
there.

cu
Reinhard