>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.
No...As slow as the news servers I access sometimes are, I haven't yet
run across a message *that* old that just got imported. :)
>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.
No, they don't show up in the newsgroup listings.
>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.
Yeah...I got that from the previous person who replied to me. Thanks.
>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 once a week really isn't the optimum interval?
>> 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.
Well, I thought, for some reason, that when I expired articles, that
they'd get deleted out of news.dat. I knew that wasn't the case, but
didn't remember that fact until I was reminded of it by another reader
here. What I thought was that maybe there was a bug in the expire
routine that required that the expire be run *exactly* 14 days (for
example) after the date on an article or it wouldn't expire it.
>Did they not go away from the newsgroup listings?
Well, they weren't in the newsgroup listings in the first place. That
should have been my first clue. :)
>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.
Yep. That was the piece that I knew but had forgotten.. Thanks for the
answer, though.
-- +------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Dirk A. Loedding <*> judge@america.net | +------------------------------------------------------------------------+