Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!tale From: tale@rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: Expire/history file question Message-ID: Date: 4 Feb 91 19:38:46 GMT References: <1991Feb4.144836.2706@progress.com> Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Computer Science, Troy NY Lines: 38 Nntp-Posting-Host: cs.rpi.edu In <1991Feb4.144836.2706@progress.com> erf@progress.COM (Eric Feigenson): 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)? Um, gee. You want hidden messages? I guess the only other thing you could say it significantly meant is that somehow your history file got a little corrupted and expire won't be able to handle any of the aflicted lines. In the case that you have here, that means at least two articles, possibly more. Is it serious? Will it go away on its own? Depends on what you call serious. It will mean that the article(s) that were in the lines which got clobbered will not be expired. The line gets rewritten to the new history file so you will keep seeing it until you deal with it manually. <56191@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> 665179672~- rec.a 665180849~- misc.jobs.misc/1232 (looking at this line reveals the obvious problem that a control character is stuck in the middle of the line, as if struck by something like line noise... how could this happen? How can I fix these lines???) Well, news strips most control characters so if a troublesome one was there, I don't know what it is. Unless maybe you are referring to ^K, which is infact two printing characters in the real message-id. My suggested cure is to locknews, edit history, delete that line, then run addmissing. This will retain all of your /expired/ lines and ensure that the two or more articles which got bitten in this corruption will be back in the history file as long as they are still in spool. No, I don't have any solid idea about how come the corruption happened at all. -- (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))