Re: [HACKERS] Recovery on incomplete write

Bruce Momjian wrote:

> >
> > I think you are right, and there may be some other trouble spots in that
> > file too. I remember thinking that the code depended heavily on never
> > having a partial block at the end of the file.
> >
> > But is it worth fixing? The only way I can see for the file length
> > to become funny is if we run out of disk space part way through writing
> > a page, which seems unlikely...
> >
>
> That is how he got started, the TODO item about running out of disk
> space causing corrupted databases. I think it needs a fix, if we can.

It does corrupt the database (happened twice to me last week, I'm using the
current CVS version!). You can't even pg_dump the database - it stops in the
middle of a line.
And this happened just because some process went amok and stdout was written
to a file.

Christof