Re: old articles in NEWS dir. in ver. 0.88

From: Michael Gray (labrat@onr.com)
Date: Sat, 03 May 1997 21:35:08 -0500

On Sat, 03 May 1997 14:22:17 -0700,
jms@vcn.bc.ca (James Schoening) wrote this about
old articles in NEWS dir. in ver. 0.88:
>
>Still happily using ver. 0.88 for DOS, but I have an odd situation:
>I have some old articles I don't know how to get rid of.
>
>The NEWS directory consists of files with numbers for names (like
>9686 and 9717). A printout of these files shows that each one
>consists of the text of several newsgroup articles. (I assume that
>this is the main storage area for downloaded articles).
>
>The problem is that some of these numbered files contain articles for
>newsgroups that I have long-ago unsubscribed from. I'm guessing that
>I may have unsubscribed before expiring all of these groups' articles,
>so they are just sitting there taking up hard-drive space.

That's the most likely reason for having these taking up space. All
advice in this message is from memory, since I've used the 0.9x almost
since it came out.

>Questions:
>--(1) Is there a command which will rid me of these albatrosses? or...

Yes, DEL 9686.

>--(2) Will I cause any problems for YARN if I just manually delete
> these files or delete sections of them with a text editor??

Deleting is no problem, but edit with care. Each message has a header
indicating the message size that WILL get eaten if you edit with a
text editor. If you use an editor that preserves these headers, it
should be OK, but I'd wait until all messages you are interested in
have expired, then delete them.

You also might be able to run a rebuild, mark all messages in the old
newsgroups as read then expire -r the offending newsgroup. The down
side to this is your expire dates get reset. And this assumes the old
newsgroups are still in your ACTIVE file - else you'll have to run
newgroup.

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