texpire(8)

NAME
texpire - delete old news article threads

SYNOPSIS
texpire [-v] [-f]

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.

The design of leafnode is intended to repair any problems itself, to detect what newsgroups the users read, and to require no manual manual maitenance.

Texpire is the program which deletes old articles from the local news spool.

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.

-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.

FILES
See leafnode(8) for the list of files affected.

NOTES
Texpire is thread-based, not article-based. It deletes a thread when no postings in it have been accessed in N days, where N is configurable, and the oldest article in the thread is older than N days.

It would be nice if texpire could figure out N itself, for instance by deleting until X MB space is free, but it is a bit hard to find the amount of free disk space portably. That policy also implies that news should use whatever disk space is left over by other uses, which is IMHO a bad policy, because the news service's quality will degrade as other uses need more and more space, without any conscious decision to use less space for news.

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 it should in certain circumstances; eventually it will.

If a group is removed by hand from the /var/spool/news/leaf.node/groupinfo file but the group's articles not deleted, texpire may never delete these articles.

Texpire ignores "Expires" headers.

Texpire is unable to delete articles in groups which have very different numbers.

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.

SEE ALSO
tcpd(8), hosts.allow(5), leafnode(8), fetchnews(8), RFC 977