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.TH EXPIRE 8 "October 14, 1986"
.ds ]W  Version B 2.11
.SH NAME
expire \- remove outdated news articles
.SH SYNOPSIS
.BR expire " [ " \-n
.IR newsgroups " ] ["
.BR \-i " ] [ " \-I " ] ["
.BR \-a " ] ["
.BI \-v " level"
] [
.B \-p
]
.br
			[
.B \-h
] [
.B \-r
] [
.BI \-e " days"
] [
.BI \-E " days"
]
.br
.B expire
.BI \-f " user@site.DOMAIN"
.br
.B expire
.B \-u
.SH DESCRIPTION
.PP
.I Expire
is the program that removes out-of-date news articles from your system.
You need to use a special program to do this, instead of just using
.I find(1)
or
.I rm(1),
because of the history file. If you just delete messages, then the history
file will become incorrect because it will show that they are still there.
.PP
The normal use of
.I expire
is to run it at regular intervals with no options.
It will remove all articles whose expiration date have passed.
If you have a lot of disk space, you can run it once a week. If disk space is
tight, you might want to run it every night. The time that it takes
to run depends, of course, on many factors; on a VAX 11/750 with a 15-day
expiration period and the volume of news that is typical in 1986 (about 5000
articles per week),
.I expire
will take roughly an hour to run.
.PP
.I Expire
has the following options:
.TP
.B \-n
Specify certain newsgroups whose articles will be expired. The other
newsgroups will be left alone. The notation that you use with the \-n option
is quite similar to that used in the sys file. To expire only the articles in
talk.origins, leaving everything else alone, type this:
.nf
	expire \-n talk.origins
.fi
To expire only the articles in comp.os, but leave comp.os.eunice and
comp.os.cpm alone, type this:
.nf
	expire \-n comp.os !comp.os.eunice !comp.os.cpm
.fi
For compatibility with the syntax of the sys file, you can also type the
command this way, with commas instead of spaces between the fields.
.nf
	expire \-n comp.os,!comp.os.eunice,!comp.os.cpm
.fi
If you have certain groups that you use as archives, which should never have
their articles expired, you must construct an
.I expire
command that mentions all groups except your archive groups. When doing this,
be sure not to forget the groups
.Ch junk ,
.Ch control ,
and
.Ch general .
A likely command would be:
.nf
	expire \-n all,!local.source,!all.sources
.fi
.TP
.B \-e
Specify an expiration period. Normally
.I expire
removes articles that are older than 15 days. If you would like it to remove
articles that are older than 5 days, you can type
.nf
	expire \-e 5
.fi
If you would like it to remove articles from talk.religion.misc and
talk.politics.misc that are older than
23 days, and leave everything else alone, you can type
.nf
	expire \-e 23 \-n talk.religion.misc talk.politics.misc
.fi
You can specify the \-e option as \-e15 instead of as \-e\ 15 if you want;
this is for compatibility with old versions and old habits.
.TP
\-E
Normally
.I expire
removes the record of an article from the history file at the same time it
removes the article. One of the purposes of the history file is to prevent
articles from being duplicated if a second copy arrives a while later,
perhaps over some other path. If your site is extremely short on disk space,
forcing you to specify a short expiration period in the \-e option, you can
use the \-E option to ask that the information in the history file be kept
round a bit longer, until the danger of duplicate arrival has passed. The
command
.nf
	expire \-e 7 \-E 21
.fi
Causes articles that are 7 or more days old to be removed, and history
information that is 21 or more days old to be removed. If you use the \-E
option, make sure that the value it specifies is always larger than the \-e
option value, else you will end up with articles that are not in the history
file; this can cause problems.
.TP
.B \-a
Asks that articles be archived (usually in /usr/spool/oldnews) instead of being deleted.
An example of its use would be
.nf
	expire \-a all.sources,!comp.sources.bugs
.fi
.B \-a 
may be used with 
.BR \-n .
If no pattern is given for 
.BR \-a ,
all newsgroups specified by 
.B \-n
will be archived.
.TP
.B \-I
instructs
.I expire
to ignore expiration dates stored in articles, and to look at the number of
days that have passed since the article was received. Not very many articles
have expiration dates in them.
.TP
.B \-i
is like \-I, but it will look at the number of days that have passed and also
at the explicit expiration date, and it will remove the article if either of
those has passed.
.TP
\-v
sets the verbosity mode. If you have specified a complex collection of
options and they are not having the effect that you would like, then set \-v2
or \-v3 to find out what is going on. Values from 0 to 6 are meaningful, and
\-v1 is the default. \-v0 will turn off messages, and \-v6 will cause
.I expire
to print every possible message.
.TP
\-p
causes
.I expire
to use the date the article was posted, rather than the date it arrived at
your machine, as the basis for expiration. Every now and then there is a
.Ch "time warp"
that causes a batch of very very old news to be dumped onto the
network; judicious use of the \-p option can eradicate it.
.TP
\-f
asks
.I expire
to remove messages sent by a particular user, regardless of the newsgroup
that they are in, and regardless of how old they are.
This option is intended not so much to selectively censor
voluminous posters (though it has certainly been used for that) but to
recover when a
.I notesfiles
site (running different news software) accidentally releases a duplicate
batch of old news. An example of its use is
.nf
	expire \-f rlr@pyuxd.UUCP
.fi
Any article whose From: field exactly matches the argument to the \-f option
will be removed.
.TP
\-h
causes
.I expire
to ignore the history file, and do its expiration by looking at every article
file in the spool directory. This is phenomenally slow\(emit can take 5 or 6
hours on an otherwise idle VAX 11/750\(embut if your history file is damaged and
you cannot use
.I find(1)
because you are relying on expiration dates stored inside articles, then you
have no other choice.
.TP
\-r
causes
.I expire
to rebuild the history file in addition to doing expiration.  The \-r option
implies the \-h option; it scans every article in the spool directory and
builds a new set of history and
.I dbm(3X)
files. It also performs expiration, so if you want to rebuild the history
file while preserving all articles (as you might want to do on an archival
file computer), you must specify
.nf
	expire \-r \-I \-e 999999 \-E 999999
.fi
to prevent expiration from taking place.
If you do not rely on expiration dates stored inside articles, it is a good
tonic to run the following sequence of commands once every now and then:
.nf
	find /usr/spool/news \-size 0 \-o \-mtime +90 \-exec rm \-f {} \;
	/usr/lib/news/expire \-r
.fi
This will remove junk files that have somehow managed to find their way into
the spooling directory, and then it will rebuild the history file.
.TP
\-u
causes the minimum article-number field in the active file to be updated.
This is used when converting from 2.10.1 news to later versions.
.SH SEE ALSO
inews(8),
postnews(1),
getdate(3),
news(5),
recnews(8),
sendnews(8),
uurec(8)
.SH BUGS
.PP
The newsgroup pattern argument to the \-n option is limited to 1024
characters, which is about 8 lines of text.
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