article would not expire

[Bernhard Kohl]

Hallo Olivier,

Mitteilung vom Dienstag, 3. Juli 2001, 13:36:13:

ON> Dear Bernhard,

ON> I tried the sort by hand, the file appears to be correct.

ON> I stopped the server and did a makehistory.

ON> Then I rerun news.daily.

ON> I notices it never do the command expirerm ${EXPIRERM}

ON> I tried to run that by hand


Which parameters are given to news.daily? Here the crontab entry looks
like:

00 03 * * * /opt/news/home/bin/news.daily norm expireover delayrm lowmark



ON> But I have still that bunch of old entries in spool/article

ON> Any idea is more than welcome.


If you can trust the lowmark entry in your active file than there is a
way to purge all files that are below this value (e.g. old files).

I've done this with a perl script:

#! /bin/perl -w

use strict;

# caution: accesses active directly
# caution: removes files immediately

# adjust path to news
my $activelow = "/opt/news/db/active";
my $articlepath = "/opt/news/articles/articles/";
my ($line, $group, $highmark, $lowmark, $dirname, $file, $oldfile);

open(ACTIVE, "< $activelow") or die "Can't open $activelow:\n$!\n";
while ($line = <ACTIVE>) {
   chomp($line);
   ($group, $highmark, $lowmark, $_) = split(" ",$line);
   #if highmark 0, than there is no article
   next if ($highmark == 0);
   #change group name to path name
   $group =~ s/\./\//g;
   $dirname = $articlepath . $group;
   opendir(DIR, $dirname) or die "Can't open $dirname:\n$!\n";
   while (defined($file = readdir(DIR))) {
      # full path required
      # if (-d $file) will fail
      $oldfile = $dirname . '/' . $file;
      next if (-d $oldfile);
      if ($file < $lowmark) {
          unlink($oldfile) or die "Can't open $oldfile: $!";
          print "$oldfile removed\n";
      }
   }
   closedir(DIR);
}
close(ACTIVE);


As with all software: Use it at your own risk! And pe prepared that it
may run for a long time (depending an the amount of old files) and
that it will significantly push I/O-activity on your machine.


-- 
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Bernhard Kohl