[This is meant to be a follow-up of a bug report I sent earlier using the web form. It's not clear to me the right way to post a follow-up, since I didn't get a copy of the email generated by the web form, and the email hasn't shown up on the pgsql-bugs web site -- at least not yet.]
I subsequently discovered that setting PGUSER in the environment gets around the first problem I mentioned, so it's really just a documentation problem: PGUSER is not mentioned on the pg_ctl doc page. But I found a worse problem. Sometimes (not repeatably), pg_ctl start -w logs the message FATAL: the database is starting up and immediately returns. I believe the correct thing for it to do when it gets this message from an attempt to open a session is to try again. Instead, it returns as if the startup was successful. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: You can help support the PostgreSQL project by donating at http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate