Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com> writes:
> So on my Ubuntu installs it does not set up the postgres user to allow login, so how are you getting to:
> su postgres -c ...
From root, presumably ...
I thought of a different theory: maybe the server's complaint is not due
to trying to read that file as a config file, but it's just because there
is an unreadable/unwritable file in the data directory. See Christoph
Berg's complaint at
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20150523172627.GA24277@msg.df7cb.de
This would only apply if the OP was trying to use this week's releases
though. Also, I thought the fsync-everything code would only run if
the server had been shut down uncleanly. Which maybe it was, but that
bit of info wasn't provided either.
regards, tom lane