To keep track of my movies and music I bought, and to be able to check whether I already purchased a movie or a music album, I created the following script. Here is the guide how to install it.

Run a scheduled script on the machine where your movies and music is kept, which creates a text file with the content. Then, send this text file to your cloud, so you can access it anywhere, specially before you purchase the same title a second time. In my guide I will use owncloud, but any cloud service would do just as well.

The script can run on a Debian media server (e.g. a full linux box), or on a Synology Diskstation (e.g. a busybox based system).

Add the following line to your crontab as <user>:

$ crontab -e
$ * 7 * * * * ~/batch/makelist

Note that you must run the script as user, not as root.

Add a user defined script in Control Panel –> Task Scheduler. Let it run daily, and point the Run command in Task Settings to the script. Due to the Diskstation treating users different from the root user, you must set the task as root to execute, and within the task lower the user (use “su” if sudo is not installed on your system):

sudo -u <user> sh /volume1/homes/<user>/batch/makelist

Add the following line to your crontab as root:

$ crontab -e
$ 5 7 * * * * ~/batch/movelist