NAME
texpire - delete old news articles and repair leafnode news spool
SYNOPSIS
texpire [-v[...]] [-q] [-f] [-h] [-r]
DESCRIPTION
Leafnode is a USENET package intended for small sites, where there are
few users and little disk space, but where a large number of groups is
desired.
Texpire is the program which deletes old articles from the local news
spool and repairs most problems of the news spool. It can restore
broken hard links, re-sort message.id links into the right directories
(necessary when the spool has been moved to a different path) and
update overview data. It can not repair loss of @spooldir@/news/group/*
files.
Archive feature: If a groupexpire parameter is set to -1 for a
particular group (or pattern), texpire will skip this (these) groups.
OPTIONS
-v Be verbose. A maximum of four -v can be used (the more v, the
more verbose). Don’t expect all the output to make sense.
Cancels preceding -q options.
-f Force expire. Expire will be made regardless of the access time
of the file. Especially useful if you regularly backup your
news spool or do other things to it where you open files in
there.
-q Quiet. Print no messages unless problems occur. Cancels
preceding -v options.
-r Repair (since v1.9.54). Runs a more thorough yet slower check to
detect broken hard links between articles and message.id files.
-h Help. Print short usage message and exit with code 0.
FILES
See leafnode(8) for the list of files affected.
NOTES
Texpire sets its real and effective uid to "news" (if it can), because
almost all of the problems I have had with leafnode are due to files
which aren’t writable for user "news".
BUGS
Texpire may not delete an article as soon as it should in certain
circumstances, for instance after backing up or restoring data;
eventually it will.
Texpire ignores "Expires" headers.
Texpire is unable to delete articles in groups which have non-
consecutive numbers with huge gaps.
Texpire does not delete thread-based, but is only looking at individual
articles, although the leafnode documentation of previous versions
claimed otherwise.
Texpire only removes the innermost empty directory when all articles
expire from a group. On the next run, it will remove the parent, which
then is empty again, so eventually, empty directories will be deleted
after some texpire runs.
ENVIRONMENT
LN_LOCK_TIMEOUT
This variable is parsed as an unsigned integer value and
determines how many seconds texpire will wait when trying to
obtain the lock file from another leafnode program. 0 means to
wait indefinitely. This variable takes precedence over the
configuration file.
AUTHOR
Written by Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra@troll.no> and copyright 1995 Troll
Tech AS, Postboks 6133 Etterstad, 0602 Oslo, Norway, fax +47 22646949.
Modified by Cornelius Krasel <krasel@wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de>.
Copyright of the modifications 1997-1999.
Modified Ralf Wildenhues <ralf.wildenhues@gmx.de>. Copyright of the
modifications 2002.
Modified by Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>. Copyright of the
modifications 2002 - 2004.
The archive feature was contributed by Andreas Meininger
<a.meininger@gmx.net>.
SEE ALSO
tcpd(8), hosts.allow(5), leafnode(8), fetchnews(8), RFC 977.