Re: pg_archivecleanup not deleting anything?

Paul Jungwirth wrote:
> I'm running Postgres 9.3 in a warm standby configuration, and the slave
> has this setting in recovery.conf:
> 
> archive_cleanup_command = '/usr/lib/postgresql/9.3/bin/pg_archivecleanup
> /secure/pgsql/archive/ %r'
> 
> But I noticed that the archive directory had files going back to
> February 2014:
> 
> $ ls -ltr archive | head
> total 9126292
> -rw------- 1 postgres postgres      300 Feb 15  2014
> 000000010000000000000002.00000028.backup
> -rw------- 1 postgres postgres      300 Feb 15  2014
> 000000010000000000000003.00000028.backup
> -rw------- 1 postgres postgres      300 Feb 15  2014
> 000000010000000000000004.00000028.backup
> -rw------- 1 postgres postgres      300 Feb 15  2014
> 000000010000000000000006.00000028.backup
> -rw------- 1 postgres postgres      300 Feb 15  2014
> 000000010000000000000007.00000028.backup
> -rw------- 1 postgres postgres      300 Feb 15  2014
> 00000001000000000000000B.00000028.backup
> -rw------- 1 postgres postgres      300 Feb 15  2014
> 00000001000000000000000C.00000028.backup
> -rw------- 1 postgres postgres      300 Feb 15  2014
> 00000001000000000000000E.00000028.backup
> -rw------- 1 postgres postgres      300 Feb 15  2014
> 00000001000000000000000F.00000028.backup
> 
> And even if I run the command by hand, nothing is actually deleted:
> 
> $ pg_archivecleanup -d /secure/pgsql/archive/
> 00000001000000000000000F.00000028.backup
> pg_archivecleanup: keep WAL file
> "/secure/pgsql/archive//00000001000000000000000F" and later
> 
> Despite the message, and the same files remain.
> 
> Does anyone have any idea why pg_archivecleanup isn't deleting anything?

It seems like pg_archivecleanup does not delete *.backup files.

These files are rather small and are only created during a backup.
They contain information about the backup, so I guess it was decided that
they are important enough to be kept.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe