Hi all,

Here is the first draft for the spec of postmaster starting/stopping
tool. I have named it as "pg_ctl."

o pg_ctl [-w] start

start up postmaster. If -w is specified, it will wait for the database
up and running. Options for postmaster should be placed in
$PGDATA/postmaster.conf.

Note: pg_ctl assumes that postmaster writes its pid into
$PGDATA/postmaster.pid.

o pg_ctl [-w][-s|-f|-i] stop

stop postmaster. If -w is specified, it will wait for the database
shutting down.

Shutdown mode can be one of:

-s: smart shutdown (default)
-f: fast shutdown
-i: immediate shutdown

o pg_ctl [-w][-s|-f|-i] restart

just stop and start postmaster.

o pg_ctl status

report the status of postmaster. It would be nice if it could report,
for example, the number of backends running (and their pids) etc. For
this purpose I propose followings:

(1) Add another protocol STATUS_REQUEST_CODE to libpq/pqcomm.h.

(2) Add code to process the protocol in
postmaster/postmaster.c:readStartupPacket().

Comments, suggestions are welcome.
--
Tatsuo Ishii