Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Is there a way to expire to a specified free disk space?
Message-ID: <1990Nov6.162018.6221@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Nov6.181747.21191@bhpcpd.kembla.oz.au>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 90 16:20:18 GMT

In article <1990Nov6.181747.21191@bhpcpd.kembla.oz.au> bernd@bhpcpd.kembla.oz.au (Bernd Wechner) writes:
>"expire as usual, but keep going if less than X MB of free space exists"

To do this well, especially in the presence of selective expiry as in C
News, means you have to know how big each article is.  We seriously looked
at providing C News expire with this information, but the more we thought
about the policy side, the more complicated it looked, so in the end we
didn't do it.  The only *simple* way to do it is repetitive expiry.

>Although I haven't tried it I expect I can whip something up using the -n
>option of Cnew's expire incrementing the date until the space is
>acceptable...

Please don't use -n for this without thinking about it real hard; -n is
really meant only for testing.  The preferred way to do it would be to
dynamically generate the explist file with successively tighter numbers.
That would also permit being selective about policy rather than applying
the same to everything.
-- 
"I don't *want* to be normal!"         | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
"Not to worry."                        |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry


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