[mythtv-users] documentation for "Commercial Flagger, command" setting in myth-settings

Tom Metro tmetro+mythtv-users at gmail.com
Wed Sep 26 01:40:35 UTC 2007


In another thread Chris Pinkham wrote:
> The "Commercial Flagger command" and "Transcoder command" settings are
> configured identical to the "User Job #X Command" settings.  You have
> to specify all options that the called program needs to execute, you
> can't just put in "mythcommflag_wrapper.sh" and expect things to work.
> I only mention this because some have tried it in the past, expecting
> the JobQueue to pass the appropriate options to the called program,
> but the JobQueue has no way of knowing what the appropriate options
> are so the only thing it does it the normal %VALUE% substitutions and
> then runs the command exactly as given in mythtv-setup.

I'm glad you clarified this, as I was wondering why the field normally 
shows "mythcommflag" and nothing else. I wasn't sure if there was some 
magic going on that automatically appended parameters to the command, or 
if it really ran mythcommflag with no parameters.

And if it did automatically appended parameters, what were they, and 
would it do likewise if other commands were specified?


In another message you wrote:
> There are only
> 3 valid things to have in that field:
> 
> 1) empty (meaning run mythcommflag using normal JobQueue arguments)
> 2) "mythcommflag" (meaning run mythcommflag with normal JobQueue arguments)
> 3) an exact command to run including all arguments (can have %ARG% substitions)

You seem a bit more certain about the behavior in this comment than in 
the earlier message.

If this is correct, then I guess the answer is that MythTV applies some 
magic to that field, but only if it hold one of two specific values. I'm 
unclear as to why that route was chosen. What was the benefit to not 
showing the literal command with the arguments on the default setting? 
(Such an approach should have been simpler to code.)

In any case, this really need to be covered in the wiki. If you don't 
have time to do, I'll add it, but I'd like a suggestion as to where to 
put it. The user manual section on the back-end setup seems to devolve 
to a list of field names by the time it gets to this field. Might seem 
odd to have one field with several paragraphs of documentation among a 
pile of fields with none. But maybe it'll help encourage others to flesh 
out the rest.


> I think you can even put multiple commands in the "Commercial Flagger
> command" setting as long as they are separated by a semi-colon.

Once the basics are documented on the wiki, I'll add a note about 
multiple commands after I try it.

  -Tom


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