media-tvdupes.py censuses a TV library by episode key and never by folder. 10 of
the 25 shows that looked duplicated in the 2026-11-02 census held complementary
halves (Game of Thrones Complete carries no S01 or S08, Modern Family S05 is the
only copy of season 5), so a folder-level verdict would have staged some 340 GB
of unique episodes to recover 54 GiB of true copies.
Show identity comes from the folder's [tvdbid-N] tag, from the tvshow.nfo the
metadata view exposes, or from an operator --ids map. A derived id that
contradicts a tag is dropped and reported, never unioned: Jellyfin's provider
table carries a 2026 special's id on the folder tagged [tvdbid-73838], and
unioning the two makes one show of a 2000 series and a 2026 special whose bigger
files then dominate the original's pilot. Files named by an id key only when the
server's own episode table (the --witness) names them, so a bare number is never
mistaken for an episode.
Seam: tests/media_tvdupes.bats — 12 assertions on which files land in the plan
and which the tool refuses to touch, on a synthetic library.
A folder-rename pass ran on the media array with no journal anywhere: no
jsonl on the array, no bash history, no cron/timer/job artifact, no other
host ever authenticating. The door was GNOME Files mounting the array over
SFTP (gvfsd-sftp -> sftp-server as dank): rename() with no shell and no
journal, bumping only the renamed directory's ctime. Copyparty cannot do
this (its bind is ro at the mount) and the *arr stack has no route to the
array at all (no SMB, no NFS, mini asleep).
Two laws fall out for the prune pipeline: re-verify survivors by size
rather than by the path a stale artifact recorded, and Plex extras rows
naming a held path survive a second section pass.
The 2026-11-01 morning leg cleared every Plex row naming a held path, so the prune page records the outcome plus the residue that is normal: a section pass rewrites feature rows first and can leave rows for clips in a film's other/ or extras/ folder standing after the refreshing flag is back to 0. Beside REAL: 0 that is a dead disc-menu clip, not a false prune, and no reason to touch the cache or the database.
Plex gains the two operational laws the run taught: a start job issued after an unmask belongs to the manager, not the shell, and lands minutes later surviving the client that issued it; a refresh fired while PMS is warming answers 000, so retry it rather than restart the service.
The trap that made a finished job look hung belongs to the remote job runner: a script fed to bash -s IS the stdin, so any child that reads stdin (podman exec -i) swallows the rest of the script without a word.
`Media Metadata View.md` said "Not deployed on Dankserver — verified
2026-10-31". That was true yesterday and is false now: the overlay is mounted
and both installed quadlets bind it (`view:/data` rw for Jellyfin,
`view:/mnt/entropy:ro` for Plex). The page now states the live shape and the
order that proves it — `media-view.sh verify`, then the `Volume=` lines —
because the whole point of the page is to answer "is the view really serving?".
`AGENTS.md` carried the same stale claim in its summary table.
`Media Duplicate Prune.md` is new: the screen ladder (size, then head+tail
blake2b, then a sparse-window confirmation before anything moves), which copy
survives and why, the guards that each encode a file that would otherwise have
been destroyed (qBittorrent `.!qB` state, year-required with digits kept,
feature length, disc/part exclusion, media containers only), and the law that a
hold on the same volume frees nothing until it is purged. It also carries the
different way `media-verify.py` has to be READ for a prune — `landed: 0` is the
correct end state because no server may index the hold — and the planner bug
that class explains: when the planner re-derived "largest wins" from the hold
list alone it dropped every keeper out of its own group and pruned 17 files
instead of 205.
`Media Relayout.md` keeps a one-line pointer; carrying the whole procedure there
pushed it past the vault's 500-line ceiling, which is the linter telling the
truth about progressive disclosure.
Frank