A little background - I've got Mythtv running on a Debian Lenny box right now. I also have a Roku frontend setup for streaming to my living room. Part of the setup requires me to use ffmpeg to convert the video from mpeg2 to H264/acc. That all works great.

However, the ffmpeg command generates a temporary file blahblah.mpg.tmp of about 1GB per hour of transcoded video. My issue is that I can't seem to delete these files automatically from any bash script.

Now from the command line, I can cd to the directory and just rm -f *.tmp and they get deleted. However, from my script, that same command doesn't remove those files. I thought maybe the file was in use, so I put a sleep command in for like an hour before the delete happens, but it still fails. I also put rm -f /mnt/mythtv/*.tmp in a root cronjob and it still doesn't delete the files.

If I just rm *.tmp I do get a prompt about "Are you sure you want to delete this write protected file?". But the -f switch seems to work fine as a normal user from the command line and just delete them.

Does anyone have an idea how to troubleshoot this problem? The particular filesystem that the tmp files get generated on is on it's own xfs partition mounted as /mnt/mythtv.

When I write a script using a command I always use the full path to the binary, on my system it's /bin/rm. A script doesn't hold the same environment as a user, so it doesn't know where 'rm' is. Give that a try and see if it works out. HTH.

Doh! That's a great idea. I'll give it a try when I get home and see what happens.

It ended up being a combination of things: I did need the whole path to rm for the cronjob. Once that worked, I went back to my other script and added it. That's when I noticed I had also prefixed the variable for the filename (path included) with the path, so it was trying to delete a file that wasn't there. Thanks again for your help.

Good job! Usually, when I can't make something work correctly, I sleep on it overnight and the answer comes to me next day.

Good to know I am not the only one who has snippets of code and scripts going through my head when I'm going to sleep. Is that bad? LOL. :/

Bad? I would expect no less from a true programmer.

I wake up with snippets in my head...

I'm not a programmer by trade, but I have done quite a bit programming PLC's with ladder logic. There's nothing worse than endless lines of ladder logic infiltrating your dreams...