Thousands of errors...what happened?

The other day I attempted to connect to my 9.3.2 postgresql data base and my connection
attempts kept failing.

I found about 100000 lines in the log file that looked like:

ERROR:  could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
LOG:  out of file descriptors: Too many open files; release and retry
ERROR:  could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
LOG:  out of file descriptors: Too many open files; release and retry
ERROR:  could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
LOG:  out of file descriptors: Too many open files; release and retry
ERROR:  could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
LOG:  out of file descriptors: Too many open files; release and retry
ERROR:  could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
LOG:  out of file descriptors: Too many open files; release and retry
ERROR:  could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
LOG:  out of file descriptors: Too many open files; release and retry
ERROR:  could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
LOG:  out of file descriptors: Too many open files; release and retry
ERROR:  could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
LOG:  out of file descriptors: Too many open files; release and retry
ERROR:  could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
LOG:  out of file descriptors: Too many open files; release and retry
ERROR:  could not seek to end of file "global/12292": Too many open files
LOG:  database system was interrupted; last known up at 2014-03-01 07:49:58 CST
LOG:  database system was not properly shut down; automatic recovery in progress
LOG:  record with zero length at 0/1BD6680
LOG:  redo is not required
LOG:  database system is ready to accept connections
LOG:  autovacuum launcher started
LOG:  database system was interrupted; last known up at 2014-03-15 07:35:29 CDT
LOG:  database system was not properly shut down; automatic recovery in progress
LOG:  record with zero length at 0/1BE41F4
LOG:  redo is not required
LOG:  database system is ready to accept connections
LOG:  autovacuum launcher started

I could not stop the postgresql server so I had to reboot the system (:

I am the only user of the db and I use the rascal spareinly.

Any idea what the problem could have been?

Jerry