EXPIREOVER(8)EXPIREOVER(8)NAMEexpireover - Expire entries from the news overview database
SYNOPSISexpireover [ -a ] [ -D overviewdir ] [ -f file ] [ -n ] [ -O over‐
view.fmt ] [ -s ] [ -v ] [ -z ] [ file... ]
DESCRIPTION
Expireover expires entries from the news overview database. It reads a
list of pathnames (relative to the spool directory,
/var/spool/news/spool), 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. 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.
If the ``-s'' flag is used, then expireover will read the spool direc‐
tory for all groups mentioned in the active(5) file, and remove the
overview entries for any articles that do not appear. To specify an
alternate file, use the ``-f'' flag; a name of ``-'' is taken to mean
the standard input.
The ``-a'' flag reads the spool directory and adds any missing overview
entries. It will create files if necessary. This can be used to ini‐
tialize a database, or to sync up a overview database that may be lack‐
ing 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.
To see a list of the entries that would be added or deleted, use the
``-v'' flag. To perform no real updates, use the ``-n'' flag.
The ``-D'' flag can be used to specify where the databases are stored.
The default directory is /var/spool/news/spool.
The ``-O'' flag may be used to specify an alternate location for the
overview.fmt(5) file; this is normally only useful for debugging.
HISTORY
Written by Rob Robertson <rob@violet.berkeley.edu> and Rich $alz
<rsalz@uunet.uu.net> (with help from Dave Laurence <tale@uunet.uu.net>)
for InterNetNews. This is revision 1.3, dated 1993/03/18.
SEE ALSOexpire(8), overview.fmt(5).
EXPIREOVER(8)