Mesg: ttyname failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

Hi there. Using rclone to download my cloud-uploaded Google photos to a hard drive connected to an rPi 2. Everything is working how I want it after clearing up all the duplicates (dedupe rename, noticed a bunch of these on email output that is sent to me). I set a cron job to execute rclone every 30 mins to check for changes. My email output now only shows one line of info:

mesg: ttyname failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

What does this mean and how can I fix? I ask because I am assuming that if there is no output from the rclone command (eg: no file changes, no new additions, no duplicates), I will not get an email. Rather. I would get an email if there was any output. I hope that makes sense.

What’s the actual script look like? Does the script run by hand?

I get the same output in an ssh window.

My command is:

rclone --ignore-checksum --ignore-existing copy drivephotos:“Google Photos” /sharedfolders/GooglePhotos/afx

What’s the actual prompt command look like?

Can you paste it all in with the error and can use three ` at the beginning of the line to get

commands here

and 3 at the end

I think this is likely something to do with the cron execution environment. This page might help.

Sorry for the late response. When the command is typed into an ssh window, there is no output, but files are downloaded as expected. The ttyname message isn’t displayed.

Usually cron doesn’t keep any part of your environment so you need to use full paths and probably pass a rclone conf file as well.

If you shared exactly what you put in cron, that’s most likely why it’s not working.

An example script that I use in cron.

#!/bin/bash
# RClone Config file
RCLONE_CONFIG=/opt/rclone/rclone.conf
export RCLONE_CONFIG
LOCKFILE="/tmp/`basename $0`"

(
  # Wait for lock for 5 seconds
  flock -x -w 5 200 || exit 1

# Move older local files to the cloud
/usr/bin/rclone move /data/local/ gcrypt: -P --checkers 3 --log-file /opt/rclone/logs/upload.log -v --drive-chunk-size 32M --exclude-from /opt/rclone/scripts/excludes --delete-empty-src-dirs

I set my rclone.conf using an environment variable and I use the full path to rclone.

Actually, I no longer get that message after reading the thread ncw linked. No email this time.

I have one more question. Say if in Google photos I did a small edit on an image (change filter for example) and saved it, can rclone download those changes?

Rclone will download the entire image if it has changed, if that is what you mean?

What did you do to fix it? Posting what the fix was helps other folks that may hit the issue.

Yes. Either as the same file with the updated changes or as a new file.

As mentioned above, I followed the link ncw posted.

Which means you changed what to what to get it working?

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