O
> cron runs programs in a very limited environment. Things like TZ etc. are
> usually not set. To see what your cron sets, just run a shell script with
> something like
>
> #!/bin/sh
> env
>
> and look at the email you get with the output.
> Read the cron/crontab manpage. It tells you how to set environment variables
> for your scripts.
Thanks for the tip. It looks like the LANG environment wasn't set and
obviously pg_controldata is reliant on that. What solved it for me
was to set LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 because that was the LANG setting in the
postgres user env.
Thanks again.