> Status 139 indicates a SEGV trap on most Unixen. There should be a core
> dump left by the crashed backend --- can you get a backtrace from it
> with gdb?
>
> I concur that this probably indicates corrupted data in the file. We
> may or may not be able to guess how it got corrupted, but a stack trace
> seems like the place to start.
Here is the backtrace:
#0 0x808b0e1 in CopyTo ()
#1 0x808ae2f in DoCopy ()
#2 0x80ec7c1 in ProcessUtility ()
#3 0x80ead48 in pg_exec_query_dest ()
#4 0x80eaca7 in pg_exec_query ()
#5 0x80ebba2 in PostgresMain ()
#6 0x80d61f2 in DoBackend ()
#7 0x80d5dd1 in BackendStartup ()
#8 0x80d518a in ServerLoop ()
#9 0x80d4c14 in PostmasterMain ()
#10 0x80ab736 in main ()
#11 0x401029cb in __libc_start_main (main=0x80ab6d0 <main>, argc=8,
argv=0xbffffb54, init=0x8063fac <_init>, fini=0x812969c <_fini>,
rtld_fini=0x4000ae60 <_dl_fini>, stack_end=0xbffffb4c)
at ../sysdeps/generic/libc-start.c:92
BTW this is Postgres 7.0.2 on i386/RedHat 6.2.
The core file was made when I tried to dump the table. As far as I can tell
the corruption occured on Friday because that is the date of my last good
automated backup.