On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com> wrote:
gdb -ex=bt /path/to/bin/postgres $pid </dev/null
I've used this on production systems to debug issues like this one, and I've never observed damage. The exact effect of debugger attach/detach may be OS/kernel-dependent, so it's hard to make categorical guarantees of safety.
At least on Windows NT and derivatives (until I last checked a few years ago), detaching a debugger kills the debugged process.