createdb confusion

I am using 7.1.2 on red hat 7.1

I compiled postgres myself

newsreader@mediaone.net wrote:

...

I try (as postgres user)

$ createdb -D /bla bla

and it says

absolute path are not allowed.

Then I read man initlocation. The example
I see is

$ initlocation /opt/postgres/data
$ createdb -D /opt/postgres/data/testdb testdb

so I do the same and it fails with the same reason

Does anyone have any idea?

How about:

export PGDATA2=/opt/postgres/data
initlocation PGDATA2
createdb -D PGDATA2 mydb

I haven't created databases in alternate locations, so I'm just
going by the manual. ;-)

Mike Mascari
mascarm@mascari.com

Well. I just did this by hand. I did this:

As postgres:

export PGDATA2=/opt/postgres
initlocation PGDATA2

As root, I stopped the postmaster (which was installed via RPMS):

/etc/rc.d/init.d/postgresql stop

In X-Term #1 as postgres:

export PGDATA2=/opt/postgres
postmaster -D /var/lib/pgsql/data

In X-Term #2 as postgres:

createdb mydb -D PGDATA2

And it worked. Apparently, you must define the environmental
variable used in the context of the postmaster session for it to
work.

Hope that helps,

Mike Mascari
mascarm@mascari.com

newsreader@mediaone.net wrote:

Mike Mascari <mascarm@mascari.com> writes:

How about:

export PGDATA2=/opt/postgres/data
initlocation PGDATA2
createdb -D PGDATA2 mydb

Note also that the environment variable PGDATA2 must be defined in the
*postmaster*'s environment, not only your shell environment. This is
a crude (and ugly) way of letting the DBA control which directories may
be used as alternate locations --- only what he's listed in the
postmaster's environment may be used.

regards, tom lane