mpg123 and crontab

[Joshua McKinney]

I've been trying to get mpg123 working from my crontab to wake
me up.  I've tried running it straight from the crontab line
both with a file list (--list /dir/mp3s.txt) and from a shell
script called from the crontab.  I can't seem to get it working
or find any info on google that would indicate why it may not
work.  I have tried aplay in the crontab and it works fine as
does mpg321.  I've tried piping the output of mpg123 to a file,
both stdout and stderr, but don't get any indication as to why
it quit even with lotsa -v's (verbose). It just prints the id3
tag and license info etc and exits.  mpg123 definitely plays
fine from a shell.

Pertinent System info:
gentoo-1.3: ie everything compiled with gcc-2.95.3
vcron-3.0.1 (vixie cron)
alsa*-0.90
mpg123-0.59r

As a side note, regarding the converstation several clug
meetings ago about the random bash parameter thing.  I had until
a few weeks ago just been using bash to generate a random number
and select the particular parameter from the command line of a
script.  This was so that I could play random oggs / mp3s from
another script.  Everything was all well and good until I
borrwed a friend's media collection, and now I have around 4000
mp3s lying around.  Bash has a bit of a cow at trying to pass a
command line of around 300k or so (guesstimate), os I need to
think of some other way to generate a random filename from a
large list of files.  Now I could write up a small C app to do
it, but that (as Mikal is often quoted as saying) would be the
easy option.

Anyhoo, probably should be sleeping (tis 3am)
Josh

-- 
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein