databases missing

Hello,

I have read some posts in the pg-admin list.
Before I go at it, I thought I'd ask again.
Thanks in advance for any pointers.

I am trying to see if there are any
useful data in an older PostgreSQL
installation, for a client.
This client, a businessman, not a computer person,
has had a few DBAs in the past, and lets assume that
all of the DBAs are "gone",
unable to help or answer questions.

select version();
PostgreSQL 7.2.2 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC
gcc (GCC) 3.2 20020903 (Red Hat Linux 8.0 3.2-7)


ls -lL /var/lib/pgsql/data/base
total 36
drwx------ 2 postgres postgres 4096 Feb 13=20
2004 1
drwx------ 3 postgres postgres 4096 Dec 13=20
2004 1061329089
drwx------ 2 postgres postgres 4096 Feb 13=20
2004 127833810
drwx------ 2 postgres postgres 4096 Feb 13=20
2004 16555
drwx------ 3 postgres postgres 8192 May 6
00:20 16556
drwx------ 2 postgres postgres 4096 Aug 30=20
2005 873826677
drwx------ 3 postgres postgres 8192 Jan 2
13:24 945587355
as we can see, there are seven folders under
..../data/base.
Some folders are symlinks from other file systems,
but rest assurred that the actual files are all there.
So am I correct in assuming that I should see
seven databases?

psql -l
List of databases
Name | Owner | Encoding
---------+----------+-----------
veritas | postgres | SQL_ASCII

in other words, there is only one visible database.
In particular, there are no "template0", "template1",
nor "postgres".


SELECT datname, age(datfrozenxid) FROM pg_database;
datname | age
---------+-----------
veritas | -11826501

So the course of action would be,
according to what I read in the post,
especially those of tom lane in response
to those of Michael Beckstette,
please correct me:

cold backup
(stop postgres, and make a copy of the OS files);
/etc/rc.d/init.d/postgres start
psql -d veritas
veritas=3D# vacuum

Mike

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