file_delete not working

good catch on the file_delete. not sure what your other comments ment.

the ripper.php script should be run by normal cron... or did you mean run under drupal's cron? there's a couple of problems with that:
* it ties up an apache child for an hour waiting while streamripper runs.
* you end up adding extra logic to check that you only start the rip on the correct cron run, i.e. some random person didn't hit your cron.php page or you scheduled it to run twice an hour.
* you might start late if you get called after a long search re-indexing.
* it's less flexible. the current setup and can be run on a different machine and you could add a little code to copy the files over to your drupal website for importing.

i'll take a look at that when i get a chance. i've got some ideas for big change to the ripper script. it all kind of ties into reworking of the schedule to remove the one hour block structure. make it more of a start at this minute ends at this minute kind of thing. for the admin end i'm thinking everything will be rounded into 15 minute increments.

the idea is the archive downloads the week's schedule and writes it to a schedule.ini file. the file consists of a list of start times for shows and their durration (and maybe a program id in there). you schedule the ripper to run every 15 minutes so when it starts it checks if there's a program starting at the current time, and if so how long should it record for.

true but my aim is to minimize the requirements for the ripper script. the ini file is simple enough it can be edited by hand or generated by another program.

let's move this discussion over to this thread.