Delete paths that lead nowhere

Yes, the eventual goal of that one is the same.

So, in that other issue I was planning on doing it in a way that turned out to be overly difficult. But, there is a php way that I can do this. (so I don´t forget later, here are the notes...)

The basic system is to check a certain group (limited by range, or some other way) and do a drupal_get_path_alias on them and if they come back negative then delete the alias...I will need to figure out how to break it apart, of course, and also how many I can do at a time.

I think this would be a nice thing to do so I'm assigning it to myself for 5.x-2.1.

If someone needs it sooner than I get to it, feel free to provide your own patch.

Turns out that this might not work for 5.x. Currently pathauto determines if something is an existing path using this little test:

  static $menu = NULL;
  if (is_null($menu)) {
    $menu = menu_get_menu();
  }
  
  // Determine the menu item containing the callback.
  return isset($menu["callbacks"][$path]);

That's not really all that reliable, but it covers the major things. Because it's not reliable, it obviously is not suitable for this purpose.

In Drupal6 we menu_valid_path to check this for us. So, I'm afraid this might have to be a 6.x only feature unless there is some other way to figure this out...

Also, I realized that this should probably either be easy to undo OR should not do anything on its own. e.g. it should present a list of items ready for deletion and require manual intervention to actually delete them OR it should copy them to a backup table and only then delete them OR a combination of the two. But deleting things on cron without admin intervention feels mighty dangerous.

I don't think this feature would be appropriate for Pathauto. It's a lot harder challenge to figure out if/how paths are no longer valid. Marking as postponed unless the other maintainers agree this should be a won't fix. Hopefully greggles isn't insulted if I unassign him from this issue.

It takes more than that to insult me ;) I totally agree with you on this.