Mark Woodward wrote:
I'm not sure that I agree. At least in my experience, I wouldn't have more than one installation of PostgreSQL in a production machine. It is potentially problematic.
I agree with you for production environments, but for development, test, support (and pre-sales) machines there are reasonable requirements for several.
Even if you have only one installation - something to tell you *where* the binaries are installed is convenient - as there are quite a few common locations (e.g. packages installing in /usr or /usr/local, source builds in /usr/local/pgsql or /opt/pgsql). I've seen many *uncommon* variants: (e.g. /usr/local/postgresql, /usr/local/postgresql-<version>, /usr/local/pgsql/<version>, ...).
Admittedly, given that the binaries are likely to be in the cluster-owners default PATH, it is not as hard to find them as the data directory. However, this is all about convenience it would seem, since (for many *nix platforms) two simple searches will give you most of what is needed:
$ locate postmaster $ locate pg_hba.conf Cheers Mark ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org