nyssa@terminus.UUCP (The Prime Minister) (12/01/88)
On seeing David Taylor's pexpire, I finally got the impetus to write an expire command which does not need multiple runs if you want to vary expire times for different newsgroups. Work on the new expire command, nexpire, was started about three weeks ago, and it is now stable enough for me to request beta sites for testing. nexpire is meant to be run once, it will peruse the history file to determine which articles stay and which go. In memory, it keeps a table of newsgroups and expiration times. The expiration times are generated by pexpire, as modified by Mike Pearce. In news.software.b are two articles giving a bit more detail on the workings of the commands. We are looking for a few sites to test these commands on different configurations. It currently works on a 3B2-600 running System V, and it compiles and appears to run cleanly on a VAX running BSD 4.3. (The test issued the commands, but did not invoke them.) If you wish to be a beta site, please drop me a line and I will mail you a copy of the package.