>Mon, 27 Jan 97 00:52:36 "Stefan A. Deutscher" <sad@ibm.net> wrote:
>
>> I have a little question regarding the 'expire' command:
>> My news.dat file is about 17 MB, and no matter how much it
>> expires, it stays at 17 MB. I'd assume the thing would shrink
>> afterwards?
>
>> expire -r
>> [lots of things being reported...]
>
>I recently discovered something interesting about expire.
>
>expire -r does not shrink news.dat
expire -r DOES shrink news.dat IF you have read the articles
that are at the END of news.dat. If the last article in news.dat
is one that you are keeping, or is one that you haven't gotten
around to reading yet, then expire -r will not reduce the
size of news.dat. If you have a 10MB file with only 1 article
in it, reading that article, then running expire -r will reduce
the size of news.dat to 20 bytes.
>
>expire -o *does* shrink news.dat, if it expires outdated posts.
>
>Evidently import appends news to the end of news.dat and expire -o
>whacks off the beginning of news.dat. Over time this would tend
>to frag the file if you're using FAT. For large files, particularly,
>a periodic defrag would seem indicated.
>
>I keep posts around for 10 days, and my news.dat file has been a nice
>9 or 10 megs for a couple weeks now.
>
>Make sure your system clock is set accurately before you try this at
>home. :)
>
>-- Larry
>
*----------------------------------------------------------------------*
Robert Gammon My opinions are my own. In no way do
rgammon@micro.ti.com I represent the views of my employer
Using OS/2 Warp Connect, and a user of every version of OS/2 since v1.0
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