Forgot about 'pg_ctl status'. That will work fine for my needs. Ray Stell mentioned it would be helpful to see a description of all the things that go on from start to finish, in general or course. I agree. It helps to know the logic going on behind the scenes when things break. I had a problem in August where PostgreSQL would not come up; I finally traced it to broken links in the libraries, but it took a long time to find .... and there were no error messages logged to help. Does this kind of information exist anywhere? -----Original Message----- From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 10:16 AM To: Lane Van Ingen Cc: pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [ADMIN] What Are Last Steps Performed When PostgreSQL Starts? "Lane Van Ingen" <lvaningen@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > QUESTION: what are the few last steps that PostgreSQL does when it starts > up? I am looking for things that I can check to be sure it has completed > installation (from a script) before allowing the script to proceed to the > next step, like: I'm confused about whether you are talking about installation or server startup. If installation, shouldn't your script just be waiting for the subprocess to exit? As for server startup, the best procedure is the one pg_ctl uses: try to make a connection, if fail, sleep a second or so and try again. regards, tom lane