Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

On 6 March 2012 18:20, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> 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.

After a reboot, initdb completes successfully.  I don't think it
performed an fsck of any kind as I don't see it in the logs.

--
Thom