Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

On 6 March 2012 17:53, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Thom Brown <thom@linux.com> writes:
>> /home/thom/Development/data was causing problems so:
>
>> mv data databroken
>> mkdir data
>> initdb
>
>> ... working fine again.  I then used the postmaster.pid from this when
>> started up.  But if I do:
>
>> pg_ctl stop
>> rm -rf data
>> mv databroken data
>> initdb
>
>> ... error messages appear again.
>
> Okay, so the question becomes: what is different between databroken and
> a freshly mkdir'd empty directory?  If there is no visible difference in
> contents, ownership, or permissions, then it seems like this is evidence
> of a filesystem bug (ie, apparently empty directory acts nonempty for
> some operations).

You may well be right.  There appear to be dark forces at work here:

thom@swift:~/Development/data$ touch postmaster.pid
thom@swift:~/Development/data$ ls -l
total 0
thom@swift:~/Development/data$ touch file.txt
thom@swift:~/Development/data$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-rw-r-- 1 thom thom 0 2012-03-06 17:59 file.txt

--
Thom