NAME
expireover - Expire entries from the news overview database
SYNOPSIS
expireover [-ekNpqs] [-f file] [-w offset] [-z rmfile] [-Z lowmarkfile]
DESCRIPTION
expireover expires old entries from the news overview database. It
reads in a list of newsgroups (by default from pathdb/active, but a
different file can be specified with the -f option) and then removes
from the overview database mentions of any articles that no longer
exist in the news spool.
If groupbaseexpiry in inn.conf is true, expireover also removes old
articles from the news spool according to the expiration rules in
expire.ctl. Otherwise it only removes overview entries for articles
that have already been removed by some other process, and -e, -k, -N,
-p, -q, -w, and -z are all ignored.
When groupbaseexpiry is set, the default behavior of expireover is to
remove the article from the spool once it expires out of all of the
newsgroups to which it was crossposted. The article is, however,
removed from the overview database of each newsgroup as soon as it
expires out of that individual newsgroup. The effect is that an
article crossposted to several groups will be removed from the overview
database from each group one-by-one as its age passes the expiration
threshold for that group as set in expire.ctl, and then when it expires
out of the last newsgroup, it will be deleted from the news spool.
Articles that are stored in self-expiring storage backends such as CNFS
are normally treated differently and not expired until they expire out
of the backend regardless of expire.ctl. See -N, however.
By default, expireover purges all overview information for newsgroups
that have been removed from the server; this behavior is suppressed if
-f is given.
OPTIONS
-e Remove articles from the news spool and all overview databases as
soon as they expire out of any newsgroup to which they are posted,
rather than retain them until they expire out of all newsgroups.
-e and -k cannot be used at the same time. This flag is ignored if
groupbaseexpiry is false.
-f file
Use file as the newsgroup list instead of pathdb/active. file can
be "-" to indicate standard input. Using this flag suppresses the
normal purge of all overview information from newsgroups that have
been removed from the server.
-k Retain all overview information for an article, as well as the
article itself, until it expires out of all newsgroups to which it
was posted. This can cause articles to stick around in a newsgroup
for longer than the expire.ctl rules indicate, when they’re
crossposted. -e and -k cannot be used at the same time. This flag
is ignored if groupbaseexpiry is false.
-N Apply expire.ctl rules to expire articles even from storage methods
that have self-expire functionality. This may remove articles from
self-expiring storage methods before the articles "naturally"
expire. This flag is ignored if groupbaseexpiry is false.
-p By default, expireover bases decisions on whether to remove an
article on the arrival time on the server. This means that
articles may be kept a little longer than if the decision were
based on the article’s posting date. If this option is given,
expiration decisions are based on the article posting date instead.
This flag is ignored if groupbaseexpiry is false.
-q expireover normally prints statistics at the end of the expiration
process. -q suppresses this report. This flag is ignored if
groupbaseexpiry is false.
-s expireover normally only checks the existence of articles in the
news spool if querying the storage method for that article to see
if it still exists is considered "inexpensive". To always check
the existence of all articles regardless of how resource-intensive
this may be, use the -s flag. See storage.conf(5) for more
information about this metric.
-w offset
"Warps" time so that expireover thinks that it’s running at some
time other than the current time. This is occasionally useful to
force groups to be expired or not expired without changing
expire.ctl for the expire run. offset should be a signed floating
point number specifying the number of days difference from the
current time to use as "now". This flag is ignored if
groupbaseexpiry is false.
-z rmfile
Don’t remove articles immediately but instead write the path to the
article or the token of the article to rmfile, which is suitable
input for fastrm(1). This can substantially speed up deletion of
expired articles for those storage methods where each article is a
single file (such as tradspool and timehash). See the description
of the delayrm keyword in news.daily(8) for more details. This
flag is ignored if groupbaseexpiry is false.
-Z lowmarkfile
Write the lowest article numbers for each newsgroup as it’s expired
to the specified file. This file is then suitable for "ctlinnd
lowmark". See ctlinnd(8) for more information.
EXAMPLES
Normally expireover is invoked from news.daily(8), which handles such
things as processing the rmfile and lowmarkfile if necessary.
Sometimes it’s convenient to manually expire a particular newsgroup,
however. This can be done with a command like:
echo example.test | expireover -f - -Z <pathtmp in inn.conf>/lowmark
ctlinnd lowmark <pathtmp>/lowmark
This can be particularly useful if a lot of articles in a particular
group have expired but the overview information is still present,
causing some clients to see a lot of "this article may have been
cancelled" messages when they first enter the newsgroup.
HISTORY
Written by Rob Robertson <rob@violet.berkeley.edu> and Rich $alz
<rsalz@uunet.uu.net> (with help from Dave Lawrence <tale@uunet.uu.net>)
for InterNetNews.
$Id: expireover.pod 8575 2009-08-18 13:53:54Z iulius $
SEE ALSO
active(5), ctlinnd(8), expire(8), expire.ctl(5), inn.conf(5),
news.daily(8).