Re: fgets failure in Solaris after patching

"Stephan, Richard" <RStephan@nyiso.com> writes:
> Rebuilt the PostgreSQL server software because we were patching up from 9.0.4 to 9.0.8.  Deployed software and
receivedthe following error when trying to restart server. 
> fgets failure: Error 0
> The program postgres is needed by pg_ctl but was not found in the same directory as pg_ctl

Is that a verbatim copy of the error message?  When I try intentionally
provoking this type of failure (by renaming the postgres executable out
of the way), 9.0 pg_ctl gives me this:

$ pg_ctl start
The program "postgres" is needed by pg_ctl but was not found in the
same directory as "/home/tgl/version90/bin/pg_ctl".
Check your installation.
$

The lack of double quotes and the lack of a full path to the pg_ctl
program make me wonder if you're running some really old copy of
pg_ctl instead of the 9.0 version as intended.

Anyway, if you didn't copy-and-paste exactly, what the error indicates
is that pg_ctl tried to execute "postgres -V" and didn't get any output.
What happens when you try that directly?

            regards, tom lane