Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!sdd.hp.com!news.cs.indiana.edu!msi.umn.edu!molenda From: molenda@s1.msi.umn.edu (Jason Molenda) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: *SERIOUS* expire problem... Keywords: help! Message-ID: <1991Mar8.041513.5491@s1.msi.umn.edu> Date: 8 Mar 91 04:15:13 GMT References: <1991Mar8.015811.243@fs7.ece.cmu.edu> Organization: Minnesota Supercomputer Institute Lines: 35 george@taca.ece.cmu.edu (George Cebulka) writes: > I'm having a problem with articles not getting expired. [...] > When I run "newsfrom 02/24/91 02/28/91" it returns exactly one article. >However, when I cd into a spool directroy for a newsgroup there are many the >creation dates show many files which fit into this time frame. Most of them >seem to be from around the Feb/24-Feb/28 time frame. It would almost seem that >few, if any, articles are getting deleted since that Feb 26. News Hiccup. It happens all the time, although there is No Good Reason for it to; in theory it shouldn't happen at all. The problem is most likely that the messages are not listed in the history file (/usr/lib/news/history, usually). Expire really just scans through the history file when it is deciding what articles should be expired. If, by some magic fate, an article is not listed in the history file, then expire will never delete it. newsfrom probably does the same thing (I've never used it so I'm not sure exactly how it works). Again, if the messages aren't in the history file, newsfrom won't list them. The easiest solution is to run 'addmissing' if you are running a recent version of Cnews (I forget when addmissing was added.. fairly recently I believe). This will run around the spool directory checking for messages that Cnews doesn't know about (or something to that effect). Alternatively, run a manual find(1) to delete messages older than days and delete them. The problem with this is that if you archive any newsgroups or keep them longer than days, you'll have to do some weird stuff to keep find(1) away from those messages. -- More information that you couldn't have existed another day without, from: Jason Molenda, Tech Support, Iris & News Admin, Minnesota Supercomputer Inst molenda@s1.msi.umn.edu || molenda%msi.umn.edu@umnacvx.bitnet "And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs