Re: Expire problems

From: Steve_Coletti (bigsteve@dorsai.org)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 13:36:57 -0500

In article <k3Uk08MBAX9L090yn@america.net>,
judge@america.net (Dirk A. Loedding) wrote:
>I was poking around in my news.dat file...I'm using Yarn95 v.90 (tried
>.92, but it caused problems with my machine, causing it to lock up
>frequently). I noticed articles still hanging around from September!
>
>So, I reset the date on my machine to September, and started running
>expires, resetting the date up by a day, and running expire -o, and
>repeating the process until I'd caught up with the current date. And
>nothing went away. And, my Keep settings are no more than 14 days for
>any given newsgroup. Is anyone else aware of a bug in the expire95.exe
>program?

There is a difference between Expiring a message and deleteing it from the
database, (NEWS.DAT). When a posting is expired it only means that Import
can overwrite that section of the file with a new message. If it doesn't,
the old article is still there, although Yarn will not "see" it.

To get rid of them, and reduce the size of the NEWS.DAT file, use the
REBUILD.EXE with the -s option on the command line. The only problem with
this is that while all the expired articles will be eliminated, all the
retained articles will have their import dates reset to the time you ran
REBUILD.

That means that any article due to automatially expire between the day you
run the program and whenever, will not expire until the number of days you
have set to automatically expire them after the rebuild. Of course you can
still manually expire them.

-- 
 < ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^>
 <                         "Big Steve" Coletti                         >
 <       Computer and Network Installation, Upgrades and Repair.       >
 <                    Internet: bigsteve@dorsai.org                    >
 < I was balding, then I installed Windows 95 and pulled the rest out. >
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