NAME¶
expireover - Expire entries from the news overview database
SYNOPSIS¶
expireover [
-ekNpqs] [
-f file] [
-w
offset] [
-z rmfile] [
-Z lowmarkfile]
DESCRIPTION¶
expireover expires old entries from the news overview database. It reads
in a list of newsgroups (by default from
pathdb/active, but a different
file can be specified with the
-f option) and then removes from the
overview database mentions of any articles that no longer exist in the news
spool.
If
groupbaseexpiry in
inn.conf is true,
expireover also
removes old articles from the news spool according to the expiration rules in
expire.ctl. Otherwise it only removes overview entries for articles
that have already been removed by some other process, and
-e,
-k,
-N,
-p,
-q,
-w, and
-z are all
ignored.
When
groupbaseexpiry is set, the default behavior of
expireover is
to remove the article from the spool once it expires out of all of the
newsgroups to which it was crossposted. The article is, however, removed from
the overview database of each newsgroup as soon as it expires out of that
individual newsgroup. The effect is that an article crossposted to several
groups will be removed from the overview database from each group one-by-one
as its age passes the expiration threshold for that group as set in
expire.ctl, and then when it expires out of the last newsgroup, it will
be deleted from the news spool.
Articles that are stored in self-expiring storage backends such as CNFS are
normally treated differently and not expired until they expire out of the
backend regardless of
expire.ctl. See
-N, however.
By default,
expireover purges all overview information for newsgroups
that have been removed from the server; this behavior is suppressed if
-f is given.
OPTIONS¶
- -e
- Remove articles from the news spool and all overview databases as soon as
they expire out of any newsgroup to which they are posted, rather than
retain them until they expire out of all newsgroups. -e and
-k cannot be used at the same time. This flag is ignored if
groupbaseexpiry is false.
- -f file
- Use file as the newsgroup list instead of pathdb/active.
file can be "-" to indicate standard input. Using this
flag suppresses the normal purge of all overview information from
newsgroups that have been removed from the server.
- -k
- Retain all overview information for an article, as well as the article
itself, until it expires out of all newsgroups to which it was posted.
This can cause articles to stick around in a newsgroup for longer than the
expire.ctl rules indicate, when they're crossposted. -e and
-k cannot be used at the same time. This flag is ignored if
groupbaseexpiry is false.
- -N
- Apply expire.ctl rules to expire articles even from storage methods
that have self-expire functionality. This may remove articles from
self-expiring storage methods before the articles "naturally"
expire. This flag is ignored if groupbaseexpiry is false.
- -p
- By default, expireover bases decisions on whether to remove an
article on the arrival time on the server. This means that articles may be
kept a little longer than if the decision were based on the article's
posting date. If this option is given, expiration decisions are based on
the article posting date instead. This flag is ignored if
groupbaseexpiry is false.
- -q
- expireover normally prints statistics at the end of the expiration
process. -q suppresses this report. This flag is ignored if
groupbaseexpiry is false.
- -s
- expireover normally only checks the existence of articles in the
news spool if querying the storage method for that article to see if it
still exists is considered "inexpensive". To always check the
existence of all articles regardless of how resource-intensive this may
be, use the -s flag. See storage.conf(5) for more
information about this metric.
- -w offset
- "Warps" time so that expireover thinks that it's running
at some time other than the current time. This is occasionally useful to
force groups to be expired or not expired without changing
expire.ctl for the expire run. offset should be a signed
floating point number specifying the number of days difference from the
current time to use as "now". This flag is ignored if
groupbaseexpiry is false.
- -z rmfile
- Don't remove articles immediately but instead write the path to the
article or the token of the article to rmfile, which is suitable
input for fastrm(1). This can substantially speed up deletion of
expired articles for those storage methods where each article is a single
file (such as tradspool and timehash). See the description of the
delayrm keyword in news.daily(8) for more details. This flag
is ignored if groupbaseexpiry is false.
- -Z lowmarkfile
- Write the lowest article numbers for each newsgroup as it's expired to the
specified file. This file is then suitable for "ctlinnd
lowmark". See ctlinnd(8) for more information.
EXAMPLES¶
Normally
expireover is invoked from
news.daily(8), which handles
such things as processing the
rmfile and
lowmarkfile if
necessary. Sometimes it's convenient to manually expire a particular
newsgroup, however. This can be done with a command like:
echo example.test | expireover -f - -Z <pathtmp in inn.conf>/lowmark
ctlinnd lowmark <pathtmp>/lowmark
This can be particularly useful if a lot of articles in a particular group have
expired but the overview information is still present, causing some clients to
see a lot of "this article may have been cancelled" messages when
they first enter the newsgroup.
HISTORY¶
Written by Rob Robertson <rob@violet.berkeley.edu> and Rich $alz
<rsalz@uunet.uu.net> (with help from Dave Lawrence
<tale@uunet.uu.net>) for InterNetNews.
$Id: expireover.pod 8575 2009-08-18 13:53:54Z iulius $
SEE ALSO¶
active(5),
ctlinnd(8),
expire(8),
expire.ctl(5),
inn.conf(5),
news.daily(8).