Re: file-locking and postmaster.pid

On Tuesday 23 May 2006 19:36, Tom Lane wrote:
> Adis Nezirovic <adis@linux.org.ba> writes:
> > Well, maybe you could tweak postgres startup script, add check for post
> > master (either 'pgrep postmaster' or 'ps -axu | grep [p]ostmaster'), and
> > delete pid file on negative results.
>
> This is exactly what you should NOT do.
>
> A start script that thinks it is smarter than the postmaster is almost
> certainly wrong.  It is certainly dangerous, too, because auto-deleting
> that pidfile destroys the interlock against having two postmasters
> running in the same data directory (which WILL corrupt your data,
> quickly and irretrievably).  All it takes to cause a problem is to
> use the start script to start a postmaster, forgetting that you already
> have one running ...

My PG is not started with startup-scripts, but with this command:

pg_ctl -D $PGDATA -l $PGDIR/log/logfile-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.log start

--
Andreas Joseph Krogh <andreak@officenet.no>
Senior Software Developer / Manager
gpg public_key: http://dev.officenet.no/~andreak/public_key.asc
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