the user tries to do kill -9 -1 and log in again

in the startup script i do the following

/sbin/pidof -s postmaster

and it still displays some value,

however ps -aef | grep postmaster does not display anything

is it ok if i do the following
pid1=`/sbin/pidof -s postmaster`
pid2=`ps -eaf | grep postmaster | grep -v grep | tail -1 | awk '{print $2}'`

if ($pid1 and $pid2)
=> postmaster is already running

otherwise

i check if postmaster.pid exists
if it does, i delete it
and then start postmaster by doing $PGCTL -l $POSTGRES_LOG -D $PGDATA -p $POSTMASTER -o '-p ${PGPORT}' start > /dev/null 2>&1

is it ok?

thanks,
regards
Surabhi