Re: Unhelpful initdb error message

Thom Brown <thom@linux.com> writes:
> /home/thom/Development/data was causing problems so:

> mv data databroken
> mkdir data
> initdb

> ... working fine again.  I then used the postmaster.pid from this when
> started up.  But if I do:

> pg_ctl stop
> rm -rf data
> mv databroken data
> initdb

> ... error messages appear again.

Okay, so the question becomes: what is different between databroken and
a freshly mkdir'd empty directory?  If there is no visible difference in
contents, ownership, or permissions, then it seems like this is evidence
of a filesystem bug (ie, apparently empty directory acts nonempty for
some operations).

            regards, tom lane