I've been trying to work out a reliable script to determine, after pg_ctl start, that the server is done attempting to come up, and that it has either succeeded OR FAILED. This is for several hundred unattended appliance-type servers, currently on PG 8.0 but soon to be on 8.3 Haven't found anything in the archives. I want to determine success/failure without time-outs, since: the db is restarted every time a server gets an upgrade, and it can get several upgrades in a batch, and the cpu/disk load during an upgrade is highly variable; a restart with no recovery may still require as much as a minute to get to 'ready'. We also need to restart the server several hundred times in our in-house system tests. So pg_ctl -w start is not an option, even if the timeout were configurable to under a minute. The best I have that doesn't involve modifying pg_ctl is: # Hand-compute $NEXT_LOG from postgresql.conf # parameters (log_directory) and (log_filename). # Replace %S format with a '??' wildcard (yech). $ TEMP_LOG=/tmp/pg.$PGPORT.log $ touch $NEXT_LOG >$TEMP_LOG $ FROM=`awk 'END {print NR+1}' $NEXT_LOG` $ pg_ctl start -s -l $TEMPLOG $ while tail +$FROM $NEXT_LOG | ! egrep -hw 'FATAL|PANIC|DETAIL|ready|shutting|^postmaster cannot' $TEMP_LOG -; do sleep 1; done The nasty cases are when the server fails (exits) without being able to create its std log file (e.g. error in postgresql.conf). So I'm down to patching start_postmaster in pg_ctl.c to use popen("... & echo $!") instead of system("... &"), then make test_postmaster_connection do a kill(0,pid) if PQsetdbLogin fails. Any suggestions appreciated. -- Engineers think that equations approximate reality. Physicists think that reality approximates the equations. Mathematicians never make the connection. -- Sent via pgsql-admin mailing list (pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-admin