The command-line argument parsing in pg_ctl is not portable. This is the
output on a glibc system:
$ pg_ctl start stop
pg_ctl: too many command-line arguments (first is "start")
But:
$ POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 pg_ctl start stop
pg_ctl: too many command-line arguments (first is "stop")
This is probably because GNU getopt rearranges the arguments, and since pg_ctl
uses two while loops to try to allow non-option arguments before options,
things may get reordered multiple times.
Now this particular case is minor trouble, but I wonder in what other
situations arguments will get reordered where the order does make a
difference.
--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/