Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Expire/history file question
Message-ID: <1991Feb4.191834.7483@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1991Feb4.144836.2706@progress.com>
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 1991 19:18:34 GMT

In article <1991Feb4.144836.2706@progress.com> erf@progress.COM (Eric Feigenson) writes:
>I've been getting messages from expire (well, just this one message, actually)
>that look like:
>
>expire: wrong number of fields in `<56191@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>       665179672...'
>
>What does this mean (aside from the obvious fact that there are a different
>number of fields than expected)?  Is it serious?  Will it go away on its
>own? ...

It means that your history file is (slightly) corrupted and needs attention.
In old C Newses it is quite serious, because expire will not continue when
it sees this.  Modern ones are a bit less paranoid and will carry on, but
that line isn't going to go away without manual editing.  You need to go
in manually and edit that line (after locking the news system!), rebuild
the index (use mkdbm or do an expire run), and then run addmissing to pick
up any articles that got dropped from the history file as a result of
whatever caused the original problem.  Assuming nothing's gone wrong with
locking etc., the main cause of something like this is a crash during
news processing.
-- 
"Maybe we should tell the truth?"      | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
"Surely we aren't that desperate yet." |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry