1EXPIREOVER(8)             InterNetNews Documentation             EXPIREOVER(8)
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NAME

6       expireover - Expire entries from the news overview database
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SYNOPSIS

9       expireover [-ekNpqs] [-f file] [-w offset] [-z rmfile] [-Z lowmarkfile]
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DESCRIPTION

12       expireover expires old entries from the news overview database.  It
13       reads in a list of newsgroups (by default from pathdb/active, but a
14       different file can be specified with the -f option) and then removes
15       from the overview database mentions of any articles that no longer
16       exist in the news spool.
17
18       If groupbaseexpiry in inn.conf is true, expireover also removes old
19       articles from the news spool according to the expiration rules in
20       expire.ctl.  Otherwise it only removes overview entries for articles
21       that have already been removed by some other process, and -e, -k, -N,
22       -p, -q, -w, and -z are all ignored.
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24       When groupbaseexpiry is set, the default behavior of expireover is to
25       remove the article from the spool once it expires out of all of the
26       newsgroups to which it was crossposted.  The article is, however,
27       removed from the overview database of each newsgroup as soon as it
28       expires out of that individual newsgroup.  The effect is that an
29       article crossposted to several groups will be removed from the overview
30       database from each group one-by-one as its age passes the expiration
31       threshold for that group as set in expire.ctl, and then when it expires
32       out of the last newsgroup, it will be deleted from the news spool.
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34       Articles that are stored in self-expiring storage backends such as CNFS
35       are normally treated differently and not expired until they expire out
36       of the backend regardless of expire.ctl.  See -N, however.
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38       By default, expireover purges all overview information for newsgroups
39       that have been removed from the server; this behavior is suppressed if
40       -f is given.
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OPTIONS

43       -e  Remove articles from the news spool and all overview databases as
44           soon as they expire out of any newsgroup to which they are posted,
45           rather than retain them until they expire out of all newsgroups.
46           -e and -k cannot be used at the same time.  This flag is ignored if
47           groupbaseexpiry is false.
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49       -f file
50           Use file as the newsgroup list instead of pathdb/active.  file can
51           be "-" to indicate standard input.  Using this flag suppresses the
52           normal purge of all overview information from newsgroups that have
53           been removed from the server.
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55       -k  Retain all overview information for an article, as well as the
56           article itself, until it expires out of all newsgroups to which it
57           was posted.  This can cause articles to stick around in a newsgroup
58           for longer than the expire.ctl rules indicate, when they're
59           crossposted.  -e and -k cannot be used at the same time.  This flag
60           is ignored if groupbaseexpiry is false.
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62       -N  Apply expire.ctl rules to expire articles even from storage methods
63           that have self-expire functionality.  This may remove articles from
64           self-expiring storage methods before the articles "naturally"
65           expire.  This flag is ignored if groupbaseexpiry is false.
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67       -p  By default, expireover bases decisions on whether to remove an
68           article on the arrival time on the server.  This means that
69           articles may be kept a little longer than if the decision were
70           based on the article's posting date.  If this option is given,
71           expiration decisions are based on the article posting date instead.
72           This flag is ignored if groupbaseexpiry is false.
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74       -q  expireover normally prints statistics at the end of the expiration
75           process.  -q suppresses this report.  This flag is ignored if
76           groupbaseexpiry is false.
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78       -s  expireover normally only checks the existence of articles in the
79           news spool if querying the storage method for that article to see
80           if it still exists is considered "inexpensive".  To always check
81           the existence of all articles regardless of how resource-intensive
82           this may be, use the -s flag.  See storage.conf(5) for more
83           information about this metric.
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85       -w offset
86           "Warps" time so that expireover thinks that it's running at some
87           time other than the current time.  This is occasionally useful to
88           force groups to be expired or not expired without changing
89           expire.ctl for the expire run.  offset should be a signed floating
90           point number specifying the number of days difference from the
91           current time to use as "now".  This flag is ignored if
92           groupbaseexpiry is false.
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94       -z rmfile
95           Don't remove articles immediately but instead write the path to the
96           article or the token of the article to rmfile, which is suitable
97           input for fastrm(1).  This can substantially speed up deletion of
98           expired articles for those storage methods where each article is a
99           single file (such as tradspool and timehash).  See the description
100           of the delayrm keyword in news.daily(8) for more details.  This
101           flag is ignored if groupbaseexpiry is false.
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103       -Z lowmarkfile
104           Write the lowest article numbers for each newsgroup as it's expired
105           to the specified file.  This file is then suitable for "ctlinnd
106           lowmark".  See ctlinnd(8) for more information.
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EXAMPLES

109       Normally expireover is invoked from news.daily(8), which handles such
110       things as processing the rmfile and lowmarkfile if necessary.
111       Sometimes it's convenient to manually expire a particular newsgroup,
112       however.  This can be done with a command like:
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114           echo example.test | expireover -f - -Z <pathtmp in inn.conf>/lowmark
115           ctlinnd lowmark <pathtmp>/lowmark
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117       This can be particularly useful if a lot of articles in a particular
118       group have expired but the overview information is still present,
119       causing some clients to see a lot of "this article may have been
120       cancelled" messages when they first enter the newsgroup.
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HISTORY

123       Written by Rob Robertson <rob@violet.berkeley.edu> and Rich $alz
124       <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> (with help from Dave Lawrence <tale@uunet.uu.net>)
125       for InterNetNews.
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SEE ALSO

128       active(5), ctlinnd(8), expire(8), expire.ctl(5), inn.conf(5),
129       news.daily(8).
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133INN 2.6.5                         2022-01-23                     EXPIREOVER(8)
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