Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

Bosco Rama <postgres@boscorama.com> writes:
> Thom Brown wrote:
>> I've done that a couple times, but no effect.  I think Tom's point
>> about a filesystem bug is probably right.

> Have you rebooted since this started?  There may be a process that is
> holding the pid file 'deleted but present' until the process terminates.

Even if something is holding the file open, that wouldn't prevent unlink
from removing the directory entry for it; or even if we were talking
about a badly-designed filesystem that failed to follow standard Unix
semantics, that wouldn't explain why the directory entry is apparently
visible to some operations but not others.

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.

            regards, tom lane