cotton@cocteau.UUCP (cotton) (07/31/90)
In article <142@cocteau.UUCP> cotton@cocteau.UUCP (Christopher Cotton) writes: ----BEGINNING---- I seem to have a problem with the expire command in B News 2.11. It used to work, but now I when I execute the command I get an error about my active file being invalid: #/usr/lib/news/expire -e 4 expire: Line 1 in active file invalid: I looked at the code for expire.c and it seems that the sscanf fails in the following: if (sscanf(afline,"%s %ld %ld %c%s", groupname, &maxart, &minart, &cansub, restofline) < 4) { xerror("Line %d in active file invalid: %s", lineno, afline); } I tried writing a short c program that did the same thing, and it worked. Also the xerror() is supposed to print what it got for 'afline' but it does not print anything (maybe just a return). I checked to see if there were any additional control characters at the beginning of the active file, but there were none. The first couple of lines from my active file are: alt.cobol 0000000 0000001 y alt.cyberpunk 0000012 0000001 y etc. I also tried to delete the first 15 lines (of the active file), and that did not work. Any help would be appreciated, as the expire command does delete the news, but lets the active file think there are still news articles there, and when a new user does 'readnews' they get quite a few missing messages... Thanks, Christopher Cotton ...!uunet!cocteau!cotton -------END OF DUPLICATE MESSAGE------- Sorry about this, but 'rn' decided that it did not want to cross post this message. Christopher Cotton ...!uunet!cocteau!cotton