Re: dropping all databases and starting afresh - Mailing list pgsql-admin

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 2:52 PM, Zoltan Szecsei <zoltans@geograph.co.za> wrote:

neither:

postgres@gs01:/etc$ pg_dropcluster –-stop 9.4 gisdata
Usage: /usr/bin/pg_dropcluster [--stop] <version> <cluster>

nor

postgres@gs01:/etc$ pg_dropcluster –-stop 9.4 postgres
Usage: /usr/bin/pg_dropcluster [--stop] <version> <cluster>

works.
I've done no createdb commands, so dopdb shouldn't be what I want for this cleanup (I'd think).

If you copied+pasted the exact command you run, then no wonder it is wrong. If you look closer you are not calling "--stop", the first dash is another character (not minus/hyphen character). One is "EN DASH" with code 0xe28093 [1], while the correct one is "HYPHEN-MINUS" with code 0x2d [2].

AWESOME !!
Well spotted.
I must have copy&pasted it from one of the online pdf manuals.

In the end I just rm -rf'd the files, as suggested by others on this list. I was initially concerned about that simple approach, as I figured that many postgres conf files will still point to that deleted area - but as postgres will not run again until I do an initdb -D command, it (should) goes to follow that those conf files will then be correctly updated.

Big thanks to all who contributed.

Kind regards,
Zoltan