Yes i can do all those things. But the backups dont matter really. The only reason i put perl onto that box at all was to research the problem in the first place.

The wordpress updates and backups began to fail. They were leaving a mess behind too. Customer service told me they didnt do wordpress support. I responded this wasnt a wordpress problem because it was working fine on other boxes.

I knew i had to create a reproducible problem to get their attention. And id do that in perl at first. I knew unlink was failing, and i got it to fail in perl as well. Wanting a 5 mile view of the problem i wrote a little perl program to stat the entire tree. It saves it as a hash into a saveit file, and i can download that and read it on my local machine.

Then i realized i wasnt getting the backups of the saveit files like i should have been. And i realized that rename was failing just like unlink was failing. I have a test program that shows that unlink fails much like that one but not as clean

Pointing out these problem to Yahoo resulted in them saying i should repair my MySQL database and get rid of my .htaccess files, ones that their recommended plugins put there even.

So i didnt get to the LART yet, not even a cane or switch. But i did ask to have the problem escalated. But yet i am still puzzled how a file can be created, read, statted, and rewrittem. but i cannot unlink or rename it. I was hoping someone here might have a clue

And no, he is not paying me enough, he did give me a small bonus tho when he liked what i did to the page. Im not into flashy , nor is he. I didnt want it as busy as it is, but he did, so he got that. Its not much but if you like its located at http://jimstubblefieldfurniture.com. He keeps telling me he will send more pictures to put up but never does. I had been keeping the maintenance up on it as a favor. The last site was up for 4-5 years without any maintenance at all. If yahoo doesnt come thru, im sure he would be fine with not changing this one either. Hail, there are 3 times as many pictures as the last one had, and the phone number is current again.

Thank you for your thoughts tho.