What you have should work. It's unclear if the view "conflictcheck.view" was started and the vob was mounted when your script ran. If that were the case then it would seem like the vob was empty. How about doing the chdir then do an system('ls') to see if your script sees files after the chdir? It should. If not then the chdir failed (but you do error out if that happens). If there are no files then start another window and cd to that directory there. If the new shell window shows files but your script doesn't then there's something else wrong.