solomon (03/26/83)
Occasionally, for reasons too obscure and too rare to track down, news items fail to get listed in the history file. Since expire uses the history file, that means that the items never get deleted. I wrote a little program that recreates the history file from the files that are actually there. It should also be very useful if for some reason the history file gets destroyed. The output of my program cannot be directly compared to the original history file with diff because the history file contains "file names" that are longer than 14 characters. Thus the line zehntel.838 Fri Mar 11 05:48:22 1983 net.unix-wizards/1769 would appear in the output of my program as zehntel.838 Fri Mar 11 05:48:22 1983 net.unix-wizar/1769 I wrote an awk script to "fix" the history file to match the output of my program. I have posted both the program and the awk script to net.sources.