Database Software

Question from a rookie please be kind ( I am not even a DBA). I have spent quite some time researching an issue (long story) which up to this point I have been unable to resolve.

I have a customer running Oracle 9i RMAN hot backups on a SUSE 8 box. Our backup strategy does not create a seperate recovery catalog to support the backup, all information is held in the control files. A single full backup is taken every night.

History of problem:
The filesystem where the physical .arc files reside became full. In order to keep the customer going, someone removed many of the archive log files from the filesytem to quickly resolve the issue. It appears that RMAN was not removing the archive logs.

In researching the situation, when the hotbackup runs, validations being run on some of the archive logs are failing,(because many of the .arc's do not physically exist on the file system any longer.... I get that), but in addition and most importantly archive logs which are now four days old are still being included in the hot backup and NOT being purged from the unix file system.

I have tried many variations of the "crosscheck" command without success. I have also checked the permissions on the physical files themselves as well as permissions on the directory, they all are fine. I am looking for any suggestions that may help to resolve this issue.

Here are the rman calls for the backup: These are placed in a cmd file and called. The commands are static and are currently working for many of our customers on similar systems.

connect target /;
configure snapshot controlfile name to '/backup/${1}/snapcf_@.f';
configure controlfile autobackup on;
configure controlfile autobackup format for device type disk to '/backup/${1}/${1}_%F';
configure channel device type disk maxpiecesize 1g format = '/backup/${1}/bkup_%U';
configure retention policy to redundancy 1;
crosscheck backup;"
crosscheck archivelog all;
sql \"alter system switch logfile\";"
backup full database plus archivelog;
delete noprompt obsolete;

I apologize if I have not explained the situation in the amount of detail required, but hopefully so.

Thanks in Advance,

Jim