Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!logicon.arpa!Makey
From: Makey@LOGICON.ARPA (Jeff Makey)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: expire finds "unparsable date"--but, where? Where? Goddamnit! WHERE!
Keywords: expire, lousy_error_messages
Message-ID: <156@logicon.arpa>
Date: 18 Nov 88 21:37:05 GMT
References: <144@tree.UUCP>
Organization: Logicon, Inc., San Diego, CA
Lines: 38

In article <144@tree.UUCP> stever@tree.UUCP (Steve Rudek) writes:
>The news accounts keeps getting mail messages from root complaining that
>expire has encountered an 'Unparsable date "11/10/8<973@ccnysci.UUCP>
>GMT"'.

Just grep for the message ID in your history file.  It will tell you
the newsgroup and the message number.

>Why the hell are the news "log" files so huge?

Because there's lots of news activity that gets logged.  If you don't
care at all about what's in the log file you could replace it with a
link to /dev/null.  On a daily basis I use the following commands to
remove uninteresting lines from the log file:

-----------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
fgrep -v "sent to downstream_host
upstream_host	Cancelling
upstream_host	linecount expected
upstream_host	received " log |
		grep -v "	Can't cancel .* non-existent\$" |
		grep -v "upstream_host	Ctl Msg .*: cancel"
-----------------------------------------------------------------

>the miscellaneous log files (errlog, log, log.1, log.2, etc.) were
>occupying *megabytes* of space.

News doesn't care about what's in these files.  All it asks is that
errlog and log exist so it can append to them.  You may trim them to
your heart's content.  Be warned, however, that some of the
information in these files can be useful sometimes.

                           :: Jeff Makey

Department of Tautological Pleonasms and Superfluous Redundancies Department
    Disclaimer: Logicon doesn't even know we're running news.
    Internet: Makey@LOGICON.ARPA    UUCP: nosc!logicon.arpa!Makey