"Ed L." <pggeneral@bluepolka.net> writes:
> When I run this command in 7.3,
> pg_ctl -w -o "-p 15432" start
> it successfully starts the database, but the -w flag doesn't seem to
> notice the successful start and continues to wait until finally
> saying "postmaster does not start" and giving up.
I believe the issue is that pg_ctl doesn't understand that you're
starting the postmaster on a nonstandard port. Its method of detecting
postmaster startup is to try to log in with psql, so if it's trying
the wrong port this is exactly what will happen.
I have not tried it, but I think it'd work to do this instead:
export PGPORT=15432
pg_ctl start
Making your example work as given would mean teaching the pg_ctl
script to parse postmaster options, which seems like way more
trouble than it's worth ...
regards, tom lane