PostgreSQL Restart

#!/bin/sh                                                                                                                                                                                                     

# restart postgres                                                                                                                                                                                            

# the ( ) makes all of this run in a subshell                                                                                                                                                                 
# the advantage of this it that when it finishes nothing mysterious like being in                                                                                                                             
# another directory has happened                                                                                                                                                                              
(
# run from the home directory                                                                                                                                                                                 
cd

# sometimes this fails because the postgres process isn't running, and something else took the pid                                                                                                            
# usually this pid is owned by another user, and thus can't, and shouldn't be killed.                                                                                                                         
/usr/local/pgsql-8.0/bin/pg_ctl stop -D ~/pgdata/ -l ~/logs/postgres.log

# If the previous line failed this one will succeed,                                                                                                                                                          
# if it succeeded this one will fail                                                                                                                                                                          
/bin/rm ~/pgdata/postmaster.pid

# start postgres                                                                                                                                                                                              
/usr/local/pgsql-8.0/bin/pg_ctl start -D ~/pgdata/ -l ~/logs/postgres.log
)