Xref: utzoo news.sysadmin:2437 news.admin:5863
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ibmarc!kurt
From: kurt@ibmarc.uucp (Kurt Shoens)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,news.admin
Subject: Re: question on bad unparsable dates
Message-ID: <866@ks.UUCP>
Date: 1 Jun 89 22:16:29 GMT
References: <185@icdi10.UUCP> <730@dtscp1.UUCP> <455@focsys.UUCP> <7008@cbmvax.UUCP>
Sender: news@ibmarc.UUCP
Reply-To: kurt@ibmarc.UUCP (Kurt Shoens)
Organization: IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose
Lines: 13

Several people have written about the Unparsable date error that they
see running expire.  I, too, suffer from this (well I don't suffer much).
I was curious about the phenomenon, so I grepped the whole news spool
for the funny date and found 11 unique articles that contained the
bad date string "31 Dec 69 23:59:59 GMT" (outside the discussion of the
problem in news.admin).  They all use it as the "Expires:" date.  The
routine that issues the "Unparsable date" message returns the current
date when the error is encountered.  In our local rewrite of expire,
these articles seem to expire correctly.

No harm, no foul.

Kurt Shoens, IBM Almaden Research Center, ...!uunet!ibmarc!kurt