How to shrink news.dat?

Michael Hanson (michaelh@scn.org)
Fri, 13 Dec 1996 15:02:50 -0800

Since I switched over to Yarn version 0.91, I noticed that my
news file never seems to shrink. When I run expire, it says
xxx bytes deleted, but the file remains the same size.
(Fortunately it rarely grows, but as I am getting caught up
on reading some mailing lists, it would be nice to be able to
reclaim some disk space.)

Particulars:
Yarn for MS-DOS, version 0.91 (using yarnx and expirex)
news.dat is 11MB
I have some mailing lists directed to pseduo-groups.
I usually use expire -r to throw out articles once I have read them.

I tried running expire -o on a newsgroup or two to see if that would
do the trick - it didn't help. Again, it said xxx bytes removed,
but the file size didn't change.

I couldn't find anything in the manual or the web page about how to
make yarn do a garbage collection of the news base file. Is this
possible, or am I just stuck with it sucking up disk space?

Thank you,
Michael Hanson
michaelh@scn.org