Re: Shrinking NEWS.DAT?

Mark Sullivan (mjs@eskimo.com)
Mon, 29 Jul 1996 15:57:18 -0700

On Mon, 29 Jul 1996 12:07:59 -0700 (MST), in article <Pine.BSI.3.94.960729120706.9340B-100000@usr09.primenet.com>, you wrote:
>On Mon, 29 Jul 1996, Bob Paddock wrote:
>
>> be high volume (some thing I normally avoid) it grew my
>> NEWS.DAT file to over 30 Meg. How do I get it back down to
>> some thing more in the 'normal' (for me) range?
>
>What I've been doing is to run "expirex -r" and then "rebuild -s" each
>time. This will purge out all read articles and then rebuild the
>NEWS.DAT, shrinking it in the process.

I used to do the same thing. However, recently I decided to delete all
the unread news I had hanging around, or move it all to a folder. Then,
when I ran "expire -r" my NEWS.DAT file shrank back to 20 bytes (that's
20, not 20K, not 20 meg). I was so excited about discovering this that I
now force myself to either delete the days news, or put it in a folder.
Haven't had any problem with a large NEWS.DAT since, and I also haven't
had to run "rebuild -s". And since the folders are all individual files,
I can now maintain them all separately.

Chin, is this a feature of .9x? I haven't seen any discussion of this in
all the postings (and grumblings) about the growing NEWS.DAT files.

-- 
Mark Sullivan
mjs@eskimo.com