Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

On 6 March 2012 17:45, Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 06, 2012 9:25:17 am Thom Brown wrote:
>
>>
>> These are in my env output:
>>
>> PATH=/home/thom/Development/psql/bin/:/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/usr/local/s
>> bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
>> PGDATA=/home/thom/Development/data/
>> PGPORT=5488
>>
>> This appears in my build script before configure:
>>
>> export PGDATA=$HOME/Development/data/
>> export PATH=$HOME/Development/psql/bin/:$PATH
>> export PGPORT=5488
>>
>> And those 3 lines also appear in my .bashrc file without any variation:
>>
>> export PGDATA=$HOME/Development/data/
>> export PATH=$HOME/Development/psql/bin/:$PATH
>> export PGPORT=5488
>
> And you are sure there is no pg_ctl or initdb outside
> /usr/lib/postgresql/9.1/bin or /home/thom/Development/psql/bin and in your PATH?
>
> Just for grins what happens if you try an initdb using an explicit reference to
> the binary /home/thom/Development/psql/bin/initdb and the -D
> /home/thom/Development/data/ ?

thom@swift:~/Development$ /home/thom/Development/psql/bin/initdb -E
'UTF8' -D /home/thom/Development/data/
The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "thom".
This user must also own the server process.

The database cluster will be initialized with locale en_GB.UTF-8.
The default text search configuration will be set to "english".

fixing permissions on existing directory /home/thom/Development/data ... ok
creating subdirectories ... ok
selecting default max_connections ... 10
selecting default shared_buffers ... 400kB
creating configuration files ... ok
creating template1 database in /home/thom/Development/data/base/1 ...
FATAL:  could not remove old lock file "postmaster.pid": No such file
or directory
HINT:  The file seems accidentally left over, but it could not be
removed. Please remove the file by hand and try again.
child process exited with exit code 1
initdb: removing contents of data directory "/home/thom/Development/data"

--
Thom