Alternate DB location continued.

Hi again all.
   Here is the situation:
    Fedora Core 3 with all updates.
    PostgreSQL 8.0.1 installed - no tables to update.
    In /etc/profile I have declared:
        PGDATA=/pg_data
        PATH=$PATH:$PGDATA
        export PGDATA
        export PATH

         Directory /pg_data exists and is owned by postgres.
         Log in as user postgres and run initdb by itself or with
        -D PGDATA
        -D /pg_data

         The output is as follows:
      The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user
"postgres?.
      This user must also own the server process.
      The database cluster will be initialized with local en_US.UTF-8.
      The default database encoding has accordingly been set to UNICODE.

      fixing permissions on existing directory /pg_data . . . ok
      creating directory /pg_data/global ... ok
      creating directory /pg_data/pg_xlog ... ok
      creating directory /pg_data/pg_xlog/archive_status ... ok
      creating directory /pg_data/pg_clog ... ok
      creating directory /pg_data/pg_subtrans ... ok
      creating directory /pg_data/base ... ok
      creating directory /pg_data/base/1 ... ok
      creating directory /pg_data/pb_tblspc ... ok
      selecting default max_connections ... 10
      selecting default shared_buffers ... 50
      creating configuration files ... ok
      creating template1 database in /pg_data/base/1 ... child process
exited with exit code 1
      initdb: removing contents of data directory "/pg_data"

Does anyone have any idea of where I went wrong?  If do not declare and
export PGDATA or append it to path, everything works fine.

Thanks again for your time.  If you responded the other day I may have
lost your message as I was on the road.

Bob Hartung