[news.software.b] How do I get out of this mess?

mann@intacc.uucp (Jeff Mann) (12/29/90)

Oops. I accidentally removed write permission on the history file by
running expire as root (stupid thing to do, it was late and...)

Now I have a slew of duplicate articles, and I am wondering how to get
rid of them. What will happen if I try to rebuild the history file
with mkhistory - will the duplicate message id's screw up the database?

Any advice on how to expire these articles?

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henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (12/30/90)

In article <1990Dec29.040728.8886@intacc.uucp> mann@intacc.UUCP (Jeff Mann) writes:
>Now I have a slew of duplicate articles, and I am wondering how to get
>rid of them. What will happen if I try to rebuild the history file
>with mkhistory - will the duplicate message id's screw up the database?

No.  In fact, mkhistory sees any cross-posted article repeatedly, and
merges all the entries for it during the rebuild.  That will get you a
history file that matches your article tree, so the duplicate articles
will expire normally.

The new "addmissing" program, unfortunately, will balk at adding lines
for duplicate articles.  Otherwise it would be quicker.  Possibly I
should do something about that.
-- 
"The average pointer, statistically,    |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry

jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) (01/04/91)

In article <1990Dec29.040728.8886@intacc.uucp> mann@intacc.UUCP (Jeff Mann) writes:
>Now I have a slew of duplicate articles, and I am wondering how to get
>rid of them. What will happen if I try to rebuild the history file
>with mkhistory - will the duplicate message id's screw up the database?

The B news expire will add all the duplicates to the history text file.
It does not match up the hard links correctly but they are all listed
and will eventually get expired.  I have no idea what it does with the
DBM/DBZ file.

I wrote a program to extract the pathnames from the history file of all
but the first entry in each news group for each message ID.  Thus if
article <123@site.com> exists in news.admin as 100, 109, and 150, the
program will output news/admin/109 and news/admin/150.  One can then
remove the files listed in the output.

I don't know what the C news mkhistory does with duplicates.

I can email or post the program if there is a need.

				Jerry Aguirre