On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Ian Harding
<harding.ian@gmail.com> wrote:
If someone happened to accidentally end up with a lot of files that
were NOT part of their database in the data/base/XXXXX directory, how
could they go about getting a reliable list of files they could safely
delete? The files were there before the current incarnation of the
database, so have ctime before the good ones, but may be valid because
they were updated by rsync, but I don't know that mtime is reliable
for every file either, since some may have been unchanged from the
first time this someone ran rsync.
Not a super big deal, just wasting a lot of space...
It is a big deal, one should NEVER EVER manually delete files from under the data directory. If you want to remove the data, you can figure out what relations the files tie back to by examining 'relfilenode' on pg_class...
select relname from pg_class where relfilenode='XXXXX'
-- XXXX is the name of the file before a period
If you want to delete the files, you can then 'drop table relname' . If you value the logical consistency of your database, I wouldn't delete anything unless you go through the database engine with a 'drop' command.
--Scott
Thanks!
Ian
postgresql 9.0.4 on linux
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