article would not expire

[Olivier Nicole]

>> And still I have a bunch of outdated article still floating around,
>> for example (talk should expire within 8 days at max):
>You have to do talk.* to match of all groups you're expecting.

I modified expire.ctl, addind some wildcard characters in the group
names:

/remember/:21
*:A:8:14:14
*.answers:M:35:35:90
comp.*:A:40:40:60
news.announce.*:M:1:10:14
*.test:A:1:1:1
rec.*:A:1:4:4
soc.*:A:8:14:14
talk.*:A:4:8:8
control.*:A:0:0:1
junk:A:0:0:1
alt.*:A:1:4:4
de.*:A:0:0:1
free.*:A:0:0:1

I run news.daily at night via cron, it has run twice since I changed
the expire.ctl file:

0 3 * * * /usr/local/news/bin/news.daily expireover lowmark delayrm

Here is the contents of the expire.log:

expireover start Mon Jun 25 03:00:04 ICT 2001: ( -z/news/log/expire.rm -Z/news/log/expire.lowmark)
    Article lines processed   839430
    Articles dropped           37722
    Overview index dropped     44024
expireover end Mon Jun 25 03:13:29 ICT 2001
lowmarkrenumber begin Mon Jun 25 03:13:29 ICT 2001: (/news/log/expire.lowmark)
lowmarkrenumber end Mon Jun 25 03:13:29 ICT 2001
        expirerm start Mon Jun 25 03:13:32 ICT 2001
        expirerm end Mon Jun 25 03:39:19 ICT 2001
expire begin Mon Jun 25 03:39:49 ICT 2001: (-v1)
    Article lines processed  1138309
    Articles retained        1100449
    Entries expired            37860
    Old entries dropped        67257
    Old entries retained      615498
expire end Mon Jun 25 04:36:47 ICT 2001
        all done Mon Jun 25 04:36:47 ICT 2001

But still some groups contains very old stuff (this is just an
example), it seems that articles are never removed:

ufo<on>58: ls -lrt spool/articles/talk/abortion |more
total 7140
-rw-rw-r--  1 news  news    4229 Mar  1 03:46 169376
-rw-rw-r--  1 news  news    2870 Mar  1 03:46 169375
-rw-rw-r--  1 news  news    2925 Mar  1 04:30 169377
-rw-rw-r--  1 news  news    1328 Mar  1 05:15 169380
-rw-rw-r--  1 news  news    4792 Mar  1 09:00 169382
-rw-rw-r--  1 news  news    1623 Mar  1 09:00 169383
-rw-rw-r--  1 news  news    2152 Mar  1 09:30 169387
-rw-rw-r--  1 news  news    8669 Mar  1 13:49 169393
-rw-rw-r--  1 news  news   12631 Mar  1 17:30 169397
-rw-rw-r--  1 news  news    1675 Mar  1 21:45 169401

Help is very much needed on that problem, I don't think that removing
some files by hand is a proper solution.

I have an expire.list created that contains just as many lines (37722)
as the number marked as article dropped in the log above.

But my disks continue filling up every day.

Thank you,

Olivier