Thread: Unrecognized variable client_encoding

I had noticed in a previous post the following information:

> NOTICE:  Unrecognized variable client_encoding

>It means you're running a MULTIBYTE-enabled psql (or more specifically
>libpq) against a non-MULTIBYTE server.  Perhaps you are invoking a copy
>of libpq from an older installation that was compiled with different
>configure options.

>The notice is harmless enough, but you may want to get your client and
>server into sync...


I'm running into the same error message & I'm not sure how I got my client
and server out of sync.

 I did an install of 7.0.3 on a RedHat Linux 6.2 box that has had all
previous versions of postgreSQL removed.
When I configured it, I did ./configure --with-perl --with-odbc
--enable-syslog --enable-debug --enable-cassert  . Since my database will
not need any multibyte characters,  I specifically did not use
--enable-multibyte. My regression test went great, and after I  edited the
system's sysctl.conf to set the shmall and shmmax, postmaster started up
like a trooper. I then did the quickie test of

$ createdb
$ psql
postgres=>SELECT datetime 'now';
postgres=>\q
$ destroydb

When I did the create and the destroy, I got the "Unrecognized variable
client_encoding" notice, so obviously I'm out of sync.  The question is how
did I get that way?

I also tried recompiling with the multibyte enabled.  This time I got an
error along the lines of : multibyte is not enabled.
Your installation may not have been successful.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

> > NOTICE:  Unrecognized variable client_encoding
> I'm running into the same error message & I'm not sure how I got my client
> and server out of sync.
>  I did an install of 7.0.3 on a RedHat Linux 6.2 box that has had all
> previous versions of postgreSQL removed.

How do you know that you removed all previous versions? What do you get
when you type

  which psql

and does it match the one you installed from tarball?

> I also tried recompiling with the multibyte enabled.  This time I got an
> error along the lines of : multibyte is not enabled.
> Your installation may not have been successful.

Did you do a "make clean" before or after reconfiguring? If not, it did
not actually rebuild from source code.

                        - Thomas

Allen.Kimberly@epamail.epa.gov writes:
> I did an install of 7.0.3 on a RedHat Linux 6.2 box that has had all
> previous versions of postgreSQL removed.

You may *think* that all previous versions were removed, but there's
clearly still a copy of a multibyte-enabled libpq.so hanging about
somewhere, and it's getting invoked by those commands.  Look through
your PATH for unexpected copies of the PG executables (createdb, psql,
etc) and look at your dynamic loader configuration to see what library
directories are being searched for shared libraries.  (You may well
need to add something to /etc/ld.so.conf and/or re-run ldconfig, anyway,
to make sure that the system knows about the new PG .so files.)

            regards, tom lane