cleaning up the recovery area

hello,  

10.2.0.2
Redhat 4
archivelog mode  

i am creating a backup script to do the following:  

backup database to recovery area
backup recovery area to disk
if backup to disk succeeds, remove previous days backupset and archivelogs older than 7 days.  

we do not have licenses to the mml for veritas (the tape system we use) so we have to manage the backup to tape ourselves.  

therefore, once i backup the files to disk, i need to manually delete them and let rman know that those files are no longer on disk so it doesn't think the recovery area is full. the commands that i thought would notify oracle of the newly freed space in the recovery area are 'crosscheck backup' and 'crosscheck archivelog all'. however, after running those commands,  

select round((space_limit - space_used)/1024/1024/1024) as gb from v$recovery_file_dest;  

...does not change at all.  

anybody know what i need to do?  

thanks!
chris  

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