This set of patches has been applied as b0d81ad but patch 0001 did not make it in, so pg_controldata is not yet able to accept -D: $ pg_controldata -D /foo/path pg_controldata: could not open file "-D/global/pg_control" for reading: No such file or directory $ pg_controldata /foo/path pg_controldata: could not open file "/foo/path/global/pg_control" for reading: No such file or directory