[mythtvnz] Problem running xmltv-proc-nz from user crontab

[Robin Gilks]

>
> I have finally been able to spend some time debugging this problem,
> and I have found out what is going wrong in xmltv-proc-nz when run
> from a user cron job.  It is in this piece of code:
>
>     if sys.stdin.isatty():
>         if len(args) == 0:
>             log.critical('No input file')
>             sys.exit(2)
>         data = open(args[0]).read()
>     else:
>         data = sys.stdin.read()
>
> It appears that sys.stdin.isatty() returns false when run from my cron
> job.  Which means that xmltv-proc-nz is not trying to read from the
> file specified on the command line and is trying to get its data from
> stdin.  So it gets no data, and then the XML parsing fails on an
> immediate end of data.
>
> When I change my cron script from this:
>
>   /usr/local/bin/xmltv-proc-nz sky.xml >temp.xml
>
> to this:
>
>   cat sky.xml | /usr/local/bin/xmltv-proc-nz >temp.xml
>
> it works.
>
> Since my Python skills are sadly lacking and it works by piping the
> data, I have not tried to fix xmltv-proc-nz.

Looks to me as though the test is up-side-down. There will never be a tty
when run from cron so it MUST have an input file on the command line. As
it is it only looks for stdin input if its not run from a terminal.


-- 
Robin Gilks