ecn-pa:ecn-pb:rick (10/27/82)
.TH EXPIRE 8 .SH NAME expire \- remove outdated news articles .SH SYNOPSIS .BR /usr/lib/news/expire " [ " \-n .IR newsgroups " ] [ " .BR \-i " ] [ " \-I " ] [ " \-r " ] " .BR " [ " \-h " ] [ " \-v " [ " .IR level " ] ] [ " .BI \-e days " ] " .SH DESCRIPTION .PP .I Expire is normally started up by .IR cron (8) every night to remove all expired news. If no newsgroups are specified, the default is to expire .BR all . .PP Articles whose specified expiration date has already passed are considered expirable. If the directory /usr/spool/oldnews exists, and the .B \-a flag is specified, expired articles are moved to their newsgroup in that directory. (The new filename is the article ID.) Otherwise, the articles are unlinked. The .B \-a flag is useful when you only want to archive articles from specific newsgroups. .PP The .B \-v option causes expire to be more verbose. It can be given a verbosity level (default 1) as in .B \-v3 for even more output. This is useful if articles aren't being expired and you want to know why. .PP The .B \-e flag gives the number of days to use for a default expiration date. If not given, an installation dependent default (often 2 weeks) is used. .PP The .B \-h flag says to ignore the history file when deciding what articles to expire. It does this by examining the /usr/lib/news/active file and looking at each article in the directory for that newsgroup. .PP The .B \-r flag says to rebuild the history file from scratch. It should only be used when the history file has been destroyed in some manner. It uses the same method as .B \-h but instead of expiring the articles, it writes out the proper line for the history file. It correctly handles articles submitted to multiple newsgroups. .PP The .B \-i and .B \-I flags tell .B expire to ignore any expiration date explicitly given on articles. This can be used when disk space is really tight. The .B \-I flag will always ignore expiration dates, while the .B \-i flag will only ignore the date if ignoring it would expire the article sooner. .I WARNING: If you have articles archived by giving them expiration dates far into the future, these options might remove these files anyway. .SH "SEE ALSO" checknews(1), inews(1), readnews(1), recnews(8), sendnews(8), uurec(8) .SH BUGS When the history file is rebuilt with the .B \-r flag, any lines added to the history file after the rebuild is started will be lost.