Deleting traces automatically

I want to write a tool (likelly in bash with gpsbabel) that will do some complex parsing of some gps traces, delete the last trace i uploaded to the server, then upload a new one containing better data.

My bash script will output a file named trace200907 for example, even if it’s the middle of the month, this file will contain redundent data that was in the last trace200907 file that was uploaded a couple of days ago.

(and I do have good reasons why I can’t just upload a file with all the new data since the last upload)

Having read through the api, it’s a fairly simple matter of doing an http post to submit a file, but no mention of how ot delete them.


Asking the question from a different side – is there any harm in uploading large amounts of redundent trace data? does it get deleted automatically, or will it clog things up?

Any ideas?

Such as?

If the data is identical, then it’s probably going to waste bytes and possible skew things, if it’s similar data, like traveling the same/similar path to work each day then it’s actually useful.

ok – here goes – this will be long, boring and not very usefull, but…

I have 2 devices, one bluetooth phone running tmj, and one bluetooth gt31 which loggs to an sd card, this produces identical 2 copies of the data (in 2 diferent formats), I’m working on a script which will take the data from the 2, combine them, remove the duplicate data, then upload the results. Combining them is necisary, as one of them may (and has many times) fail to record the data, either due to a crash corrupting the whole days work, or user error removing the card before the fat is writen, both of which leaves most of, or a whole day missing.

In the past I only took the data form one of them, but I found that huge holes in the data would be present for no apparent reason.

However due to the way i’m doing it there is no way to confirm what’s been uploaded and what hasn’t, so the most elegant solution is to purge everything uploaded in the month in question so far, and start again (I could also do it on single day files, but that would actually save very little)

For what it’s worth, I already have a the tool working in so far as it combines the data, and outputs a single file per month (it’s currently a dos batch file, I will be linixifying it as soon as all the problems like this one are solved)

This is much as I expected, therefor I do need some way of deleting the data.

I would suggest that would be the best way to handle it instead of one massive GPX file for the entire month.

You could screen scrape the “my traces” page, and use the delete link in the page.

No “delete” appears anymore when I am logged in, even on My Traces. Why is that? How can I delete my traces?

The delete option appear when you click on an individual trace name.