pg_ctl man page

I have written a man page for pg_ctl. I will appreciate if someone
would give me comments on it including grammatical corrections.
--
Tatsuo Ishii

NAME

pg_ctl - starts/stops/restarts postmaster

SYNOPSIS

pg_ctl [-w][-D database_dir][-p path_to_postmaster][-o "postmaster_opts"] start
pg_ctl [-w][-D database_dir][-m s[mart]|f[ast]|i[mmediate]] stop
pg_ctl [-w][-D database_dir][-m s[mart]|f[ast]|i[mmediate]][-o "postmaster_opts"] restart
pg_ctl [-D database_dir] status

DESCRIPTION

pg_ctl is a utility for starting, stopping or restarting postmaster.

Starting postmaster

To start postmaster:

pg_ctl start

If -w is supplied, pg_ctl waits for the database server comes up,
checking the pid file (PGDATA/postmaster.pid) gets created, for up to
60 seconds.

Parameters to invoke postmaster are taken from following sources:

Path to postmaster: found in the command search path
Database directory: PGDATA environment variable
Other parameters: PGDATA/postmaster.opts.default

postmaster.opts.default contains parameters for postmaster. With a
default installation, it has a line "-S." So "pg_ctl start" implies:

postmaster -S

Note that postmaster.opts.default is installed by initdb from
lib/postmaster.opts.default.sample under the PostgreSQL installation
directory (lib/postmaster.opts.default.sample is copied from
src/bin/pg_ctl/postmaster.opts.default.sample while installing
PostgreSQL).

To override default parameters you can use -D, -p and -o option.

-D database_dirspecifies the database directory

-p path_to_postmasterspecifies the path to postmaster

-o "postmaster_opts"specifies any parameter for postmaster

Examples:

# blocks until postmaster comes up
pg_ctl -w start

# specifies postmaster path
pg_ctl -p /usr/local/pgsq/bin/postmaster start

# uses port 5433 and disables fsync
pg_ctl -o "-o -F -p 5433" start

Stopping postmaster

pg_ctl stop

stops postmaster.

There are several options for the stopping mode.

-wwaits for postmaster shutting down

-m      specifies the shutdown mode. s[mart] mode waits for all      the clients get logged out. This is the default.
  f[ast] mode sends SIGTERM to the backends, that means      active transactions get rollback. i[mmediate] mode sends
SIGUSR1     to the backends and let them abort. In this case, database recovery      will be neccessary on the next
startup.


Restarting postmaster

This is almost equivalent to stopping postmaster then starting it
again except that the parameters for postmaster used before stopping
it would be used too. This is done by saving them in
PGDATA/postmaster.opts file. -w, -D, -m, and -o can also be used in
the restarting mode and they have same meanings as described above.

Examples:

# restarting postmaster in the simplest form
pg_ctl restart

# waiting for postmaster shutdown and waiting for postmaster coming up
pg_ctl -w restart

# uses port 5433 and disables fsync next time
pg_ctl -o "-o -F -p 5433" restart

Getting status from postmaster

To get status information from postmaster:

pg_ctl status

Followings are sample outputs from pg_ctl.

pg_ctl: postmaster is running (pid: 13718)
options are:
/usr/local/src/pgsql/current/bin/postmaster
-p 5433
-D /usr/local/src/pgsql/current/data
-B 64
-b /usr/local/src/pgsql/current/bin/postgres
-N 32
-o '-F'