On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 02:58:49 -0800, Kevin Brown <kevin@sysexperts.com> wrote:
>
> Lest you think that this is an unlikely scenario, keep in mind that
> most startup scripts, including pg_ctl, currently start the postmaster
> without arguments and rely on PGDATA, so a shop that hasn't already
> been bitten by this *will* be. Right now shops that wish to avoid the
> trap I described have to go to *extra* lengths: they have to make
> exactly the same kinds of changes to the scripts that I'm talking
> about us making (putting an explicit '-D "$PGDATA"' where none now
> exists) or they have to resort to tricks like renaming the postmaster
> executable and creating a shell script in its place that will invoke
> the (renamed) postmaster with '-D "$PGDATA"'.
On at least some systems ps will dump process' environment and could be
easily used to check PGDATA.