Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!micor!latour!ecicrl!clewis
From: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis)
Subject: Re: Problems with expire
Message-ID: <1991Mar12.010536.8589@ferret.ocunix.on.ca>
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 91 01:05:36 GMT
Distribution: usa
Reply-To: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
References: <293@sporty.UUCP>
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc

In article <293@sporty.UUCP> jeff@sporty.UUCP (Jeff Anderson) writes:
>(I am running B-news 2.11. patch level 19)

(So am I incidentally)

>expire: Cannot open /usr/lib/news/history (r): No such file or directory

>Yesterday I discovered that expire was not expiring anything.  After several
>attempts at getting expire to rebuild my history files, I finally got expire
>to run without error.   This file was created as a 0 lenght file while
>expire was rebuilding my history file.  After the job completed, the file
>had been deleted.  All the files in my history.d directory had been updated
>and appeared to be pretty normal.

This is actually normal - when you're using the history.d mechanism, there
isn't supposed to be a "history" file.  Expire creates one during processing,
but it's destroyed immediately after rebuilding the history.d/[0-9] files.
Essentially, expire writes the new history data into "history", and then
rereads it to produce the history.d files.  (the history.d/[0-9] files are
a mechanism to speed up history file lookups in the absence of a -ldbm - eg:
DBM is undef'd).

Are you sure that news doesn't put anything in the history?  It sounds almost as if
your cron isn't running expire as news...  Since you seen to be a System V from
your cron mail messages, you might also want to check that ulimit isn't
biting you, and that the N_UMASK is 000 (on System V, everything has to
be mode 666).

When rebuilding, did you use "expire -r"?

What machine are you on?
-- 
Chris Lewis,
clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca or ...uunet!mitel!cunews!latour!ecicrl!clewis
Psroff support: psroff-request@eci386.uucp, or call 613-832-0541 (Canada)
