Re: New at this. Commissioning for the first time:

sa92003(at)yahoo(dot)com (Rob) writes:
> I had set up the directory...
> /usr/local/pgsql/data

> and then typed...
> postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data

> and the shell reply is...
> FATAL: data directory /usr/local/pgsql/data has group or world
> access;
> permissions should be u=rwx (0700)

> Being new at Un*x as well, I only know a fair amount about how to
> change permissions. Emacs says the directory currently has these
> permissions on the directory:
> drwxr-xr-x
> What instructions should I issue in order to meet the requirement?
> chmod [what?]

If you are familiar with octal notation you'd just do

chmod 700 /usr/local/pgsql/data

but a more symbolic way is

chmod go-rx /usr/local/pgsql/data

(which says to remove R and X permissions for Group and Other).

Note that you cannot start the postmaster on an empty data directory;
you have to run initdb first. Had you run initdb, it'd have fixed
the permissions for you, so really you can forget the above and just
do

initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data

then run the postmaster.

regards, tom lane