Repmgr standby clone segmentation fault

I was trying to simply standby clone. Pretty basic. But I was getting a “segmentation fault”, no further log output.

I didn’t know what a segfault is, so I googled it:

A segmentation fault  occurs when a program attempts to access a memory location that it is  not allowed to access, or attempts to access a memory location in a way  that is not allowed (for example, attempting to write to a read-only  location, or to overwrite part of the operating system)

It hit me that prior to running the standby clone that I had run rm -rf $PGDATA . So, repmgr was trying to standby clone writing into a nonexisting directory. The simple fix was mkdir -p $PGDATA , and on subsequent runs, using rm -rf $PGDATA/* instead.