There have been some complaints[1][2] in the past about pg_ctl not playing nice with relative path specifications for the datadir. Here's a concise illustration:
$ mkdir /tmp/mydata/ && initdb /tmp/mydata/ $ cd /tmp/ $ pg_ctl -D ./mydata/ start $ cd / $ pg_ctl -D /tmp/mydata/ restart IMO it's pretty hard to defend the behavior of the last step, where pg_ctl knows exactly which datadir the user has specified, and succeeds in stopping the server but not starting it. Digging into this gripe, a related problem I noticed is that `pg_ctl ... restart` doesn't always preserve the "-D $DATADIR" argument as the following comment suggests it should[4]: * We could pass PGDATA just in an environment * variable but we do -D too for clearer postmaster * 'ps' display Specifically, if one passes in additional -o options, e.g. $ pg_ctl -D /tmp/mydata/ -o "-N 10" restart after which postmaster.opts will be missing the "-D ..." argument which is otherwise recorded, and the `ps` output is similarly abridged. Anyway, Tom suggested[3] two possible ways of fixing the original gripe, and I went with his latter suggestion, | for pg_ctl restart to override that | option with its freshly-derived idea of where the data directory is mainly so we don't need to worry about the impact of changing the appearance of postmaster.opts, plus it seems like this code fits better in pg_ctl.c rather than the postmaster (where the postmaster.opts file is actually written). The fix seems to be pretty simple, namely stripping post_opts of the old "-D ... " portion and having the new specification, if any, be used instead. I believe the attached patch should fix these two infelicities. Full disclosure: the strip_datadirs() function makes no attempt to properly handle pathnames containing quotes. There seems to be some, uh, confusion in the existing code about how these should be handled already. For instance, $ mkdir "/tmp/here's a \" quote" $ initdb "/tmp/here's a \" quote" How to successfully start, restart, and stop the server with pg_ctl is left as an exercise for the reader. So I tried to avoid that can of worms with this patch, though I'm happy to robustify strip_datadirs() if we'd like to properly support such pathnames, and there's consensus on how to standardize the escaping. Josh [1] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/caa-alv72o+negjaiphormbqsmztkzayatxrd+c9v60ybmmm...@mail.gmail.com [2] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAK3UJRGABxWSOCXnAsSYw5BfR4D9ageXF+6GtsRVm-LtfWfW=g...@mail.gmail.com [3] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/27233.1350234...@sss.pgh.pa.us [4] Note, ps output and postmaster.opts will not include the datadir specification if you rely solely on the PGDATA environment variable for pg_ctl
pgctl_paths.v01.diff
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