How to remove VACUUM lock?

On Fri, 22 May 1998, Philip Bierhoff wrote:

Hi guyz,

Because of some strange reason my VACUUM command resulted in a complete
halt of the database PostgreSQL 6.3 on Linux 2.0.18 (already a simple
select * resulted in a halt). I had to manually close the postmaster and
all the locked backends before I could access my database again.

Now the select * query works again, but issuing "vacuum" gives:

Welcome to the POSTGRESQL interactive sql monitor:
Please read the file COPYRIGHT for copyright terms of POSTGRESQL

type \? for help on slash commands
type \q to quit
type \g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
You are currently connected to the database: komal

komal=> vacuum;
ERROR: can't create lock file -- another vacuum cleaner running?
komal=> vacuum;
NOTICE: CreatePortal: portal <vacuum> already exists
ERROR: can't create lock file -- another vacuum cleaner running?
komal=>

What can I do to remove this portal ?

If you are 100% certain that there is no other vacuum process
running on that Database, go into the data/base/<database> directory and
remove the file 'pg_vlock' that you'll find in there...

If you aren't 100% certain, shut down the server before you
remove the lock file...

Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org