Re: install problem

sol <sol(at)autonomon(dot)net> writes:
> The automated install script is:

> su - postgres -c cd /var/lib/postgres; . ./.profile; LANG=C initdb
> --encoding SQL_ASCII --pgdata /var/lib/postgres/data

> The next line says:
> Unknown id: -

Hm. Could this error be coming from su itself? "su - foo" is a
SysV-ism that means "log in as foo and run his profile script",
but I believe there are variants of su that don't understand the -
switch.

As someone already pointed out, there is no such error message in
Postgres itself, so you need to be looking elsewhere ... and you
might not need to look further than the su command. If the su
syntax is okay for your platform, I'd wonder about the ./.profile
invocation next.

regards, tom lane