Delete from "Edit Metadata" doesn't delete gamelist entry?

[hansolo77]

I'm trying to prune out all the adult games from my brother's build I making him. I've tried a few things, including rebuilding the romsets. Still, there seems to be games the various tools and rom managers I've used that have been missed. I thought I could manually remove them by going into the "Edit Metadata" menu on EmulationStation, and choosing the [Delete] button. I will say that this DOES delete the rom from the folder, but it does NOT remove that entry from the gamelist.xml file. I have EmulationStation set up to `PARSE GAMESLISTS ONLY [ON]". So it should be reading the file rather than generating it's own. My gamelists have scraped metadata including screenshot videos. Getting a clean gamelist is crucial for making sure those videos don't get displayed during a screensaver run.

Is there a setting or permissions thing I need to check before EmulationStation will edit a gamelist? Is it blocking it because it's a non-ES generated file? I thought the path to the file might have been the problem. I t was originally located in /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/gamelists/fba (via ~/RetroPie/.emulationstation) but I've since moved it to /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/fba/gamelist.xml thinking that might have been the problem. No change though. Current permissions of the file are -rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi 1500008 Aug 1 19:17 gamelist.xml.

The entire RetroPie folder structure is located on a USB powered hard drive, mounted using /etc/fstab:

proc            /proc           proc    defaults          0       0
PARTUUID=f2d3cb4f-01  /boot           vfat    defaults          0       2
PARTUUID=f2d3cb4f-02  /               ext4    defaults,noatime  0       1
UUID=80B89CC9B89CBF5A /home/pi/RetroPie ntfs nofail,user,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=0000 0 0
# a swapfile is not a swap partition, no line here
#   use  dphys-swapfile swap[on|off]  for that

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Just looking to make my brother happy and safe for his kids. :)

Raspberry Pi 3
ES v2.7.5RP

[mitu]

@hansolo77 There is no bug here, it's just how ES works. Even if you delete the game, the gamelist is not pruned for non-existent entries.
@meleu released a cleanup tool, you should check it out - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/11074/a-gamelist-xml-cleaner-tool.

[hansolo77]

Oh cool! I'll give this a go tomorrow then! :) Thanks for the heads up.

[Carcayu]

Just found it before posting something very similar!

In my opinion, It would be great an option to delete both rom and entry. Because I have ckecked "parse game list only", and this, not only hide roms that are not scrapped, but also show roms that doesn't really exist, but still have an entry in gamelist file.