Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl
From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Another rash of empty files with long names...
Message-ID: <8632@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 21 Mar 88 14:54:27 GMT
References: <483@minya.UUCP>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Lines: 17
In-reply-to: jc@minya.UUCP's message of 19 Mar 88 13:51:27 GMT


jc@minya.UUCP writes:
   Well, it happened again, and I'm getting rather curious.  The .rnews
   directory here got very large, and was filled with a horde of empty
   files.  For assorted reasons, I'd doctored the news source so that
   every call of system() was surrounded by output to stderr, which I
   directed to an audit file.  The following was in it:
   Command: "/usr/bin/rnews -S -p 5153"
   Status=0.
   [etc.]
   Anyone know what might be going on?

At a guess, you blew your news filesystem out of free-block space but
inodes were still available.  When unbatching, I've seen this happen
because it tries to create a /usr/spool/news/.ar????? file, fails, and
tries to shuffle the article off to .../.rnews with the date-filename.
Working over the files later (maybe after expire), rnews -U dealt with
all the empty files.