richard@xentu.com writes:
> Sorry, I was unclear in my description.
> In the normal course of events, log files are written in the format
> /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_log/postgresql-2015-09-19_182328.log
> It's only when the server fails to start, as I described, that no such
> file is generated.
In that case, the error is happening before the server switches the
log destination away from its initial stderr. You need to look at
the postmaster start script to see where it's sending stderr to
begin with. (In Red Hat's scripts there's a fixed file used for such
early-startup output, but I don't know what Ubuntu does about it.)
Another idea would be to try launching the server by hand, ie just
postmaster -D /path/to/data/directory
and see what happens. With no redirection, the desired message should
just appear on your terminal.
regards, tom lane