First of all, if you mean that the "Date" field reports a date from
September, it is the actual date you *imported* the article that
matters, and not the Date field. That's probably not your problem,
though.
Do those articles actually appear in the newsgroup listings? If not,
there should not be a problem. They will eventually be overwritten by
the new articles you import.
The thing to be aware of is that articles are never moved after being
placed in the news.dat file, so if one article is deleted while another
*after* it is kept, the file can't be truncated. Yarn would then no
longer be able to find the article that was supposed to be kept. The
space used by the deleted article will eventually get overwritten by new
articles.
Unfortunately, that also means that when expire reports that xxxx bytes
are deleted, that usually does not mean that this much extra space is
now available on the disk. It only means that xxxx bytes *inside* the
news.dat file are made available for new imports, so it won't grow
larger.
Some may suggest running "rebuild -s". That is a command really meant
to fix a corrupted news.dat file, but as a side effect it will remove
expired articles from the file. However, if you do that, all articles
will be marked as if they were imported today. If you have set your
newsgroups to expire after 14 days, "expire -o" will not delete any
articles *at all* for the next 14 days. After a few imports, news.dat
may very well end up *bigger* than it started out.
rebuild also often messes up the order of the remaining articles. It
does give a warning that it should only be run if something *really* is
wrong. That is a warning worth heeding. It would be good if Yarn
included a garbage collector or something, though. It also seems to me
as if Yarn for some reason places new articles in the *last* free space
in news.dat instead of the first, which means that once news.dat has
grown to a large size, it shrinks very slowly. That is why you really
must run expire regularly.
> 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.
I'm curious about what you expected this to accomplish. When you run
expire -o, and a newsgroup is set to expire after, say, 14 days, you
expire all articles 14 days old *or more*. Not just those exactly 14
days old. A single run of expire at the last date is enough.
> And
> nothing went away.
Did they not go away from the newsgroup listings?
> 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?
It's probably not a bug, but it doesn't work exactly the way you expect
it to. You can regard looking at the news.dat file directly in the same
way as looking at the disk directly with a disk sector editor. You will
probably find a lot of old stuff there, which is why undelete programs
work. That doesn't mean that it isn't deleted. It only means that the
space hasn't been reused again after you deleted it.
Yngvar