Carol Walter <walterc(at)indiana(dot)edu> writes:
> Well, it seems like that could happen. This is a machine that has a
> instance of 8.2 running on it. My bash history says that the command
> that I ran to start the 8.3.6 instance is
> pg_ctl start -D /db02/postgres/data8.3.6/data -l data836.log. /db02/
> postgres/data8.3.6/data is where the data is. Does pg_ctl need of
> full path, because this command probably ran the 8.2 version of that.
I think pg_ctl tries to execute the postgres that's in the same
directory it is. So if your PATH leads to the 8.2 copy of pg_ctl,
the wrong thing will happen. You could fix your PATH, or explicitly
write out the path to the 8.3 copy.
regards, tom lane