expireover - Expire entries from the news overview database
expireover [ -a ] [ -D overviewdir ] [
-f file ] [ -n ] [ -O overview.fmt ] [
-s ] [ -v ] [ -z ] [ file... ]
Expireover expires entries from the news overview database.
It reads a list of pathnames (relative to the spool directory,
/var/spool/news), from the specified files or standard input
if none are specified. (A file name of ``-'' may be used to specify the
standard input.) It then removes any mention of those articles from the
appropriate overview database.
- -z
- If the ``-z'' flag is used, then the input is assumed to be sorted
such that all entries for a newsgroup appear together so that it can be
purged at once. This flag can be useful when used with the sorted output
of expire(8)'s ``-z'' flag.
- -s
- If the ``-s'' flag is used, then expireover will read the
spool directory for all groups mentioned in the active(5) file, and
remove the overview entries of any articles that do not appear in the
directory.
- -f
- To specify an alternate file, use the ``-f'' flag; a name of
``-'' is taken to mean the standard input.
- -a
- The ``-a'' flag reads the spool directory and adds any missing
overview entries. It will create files if necessary. This can be used to
initialize a database, or to sync up a overview database that may be
lacking articles due to a crash. Overchan should be running, to
ensure that any incoming articles get included. Using this flag implies
the ``-s'' flag; the ``-f'' flag may be used to add only a
subset of the newsgroups.
- -v
- To see a list of the entries that would be added or deleted, use the
``-v'' flag.
- -n
- To perform no real updates, use the ``-n'' flag.
- -D
- The ``-D'' flag can be used to specify where the databases are stored. The
default directory is /var/spool/news/over.view.
- -O
- The ``-O'' flag may be used to specify an alternate location for
the overview.fmt(5) file; this is normally only useful for
debugging.
Written by Rob Robertson <rob@violet.berkeley.edu> and Rich
$alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> (with help from Dave Lawrence
<tale@uunet.uu.net>) for InterNetNews. This is revision 1.8, dated
1996/10/29.