NAME

       texpire - delete old news articles and repair leafnode news spool

SYNOPSIS

       texpire [-v[...]] [-q] [-f] [-h] [-r]

DESCRIPTION

       Leafnode  is  a  USENET  package  intended  for small sites, where there are few users and
       little disk space, but where a large number of groups is desired.

       Texpire is the program which deletes old articles from the local news  spool  and  repairs
       most  problems  of  the  news  spool. It can restore broken hard links, re-sort message.id
       links into the right directories (necessary when the spool has been moved to  a  different
       path) and update overview data. It can not repair loss of @spooldir@/news/group/* files.

       Archive  feature:  If  a  groupexpire  parameter  is  set to -1 for a particular group (or
       pattern), texpire will skip this (these) groups.

OPTIONS

       -v     Be verbose.  A maximum of four -v can be used (the more v, the more  verbose).   Do
              not expect all the output to make sense. Cancels preceding -q options.

       -f     Force  expire.  Expire  will  be  made  regardless  of the access time of the file.
              Especially useful if you regularly backup your news spool or do other things to  it
              where you open files in there.

       -q     Quiet. Print no messages unless problems occur. Cancels preceding -v options.

       -r     Repair (since v1.9.54). Runs a more thorough yet slower check to detect broken hard
              links between articles and message.id files.

       -h     Help. Print short usage message and exit with code 0.

FILES

       See leafnode(8) for the list of files affected.

NOTES

       Texpire sets its real and effective uid to "news" (if it can), because almost all  of  the
       problems I have had with leafnode are due to files which are not writable for user "news".

BUGS

       Texpire  may  not  delete  an  article  as soon as it should in certain circumstances, for
       instance after backing up or restoring data; eventually it will.

       Texpire ignores "Expires" headers.

       Texpire is unable to delete articles in groups which  have  non-consecutive  numbers  with
       huge gaps.

       Texpire does not delete thread-based, but is only looking at individual articles, although
       the leafnode documentation of previous versions claimed otherwise.

       Texpire only removes the innermost empty directory when all articles expire from a  group.
       On  the  next  run,  it  will remove the parent, which then is empty again, so eventually,
       empty directories will be deleted after some texpire runs.

ENVIRONMENT

       LN_LOCK_TIMEOUT
              This variable is parsed as an  unsigned  integer  value  and  determines  how  many
              seconds texpire will wait when trying to obtain the lock file from another leafnode
              program. 0 means to wait indefinitely. This  variable  takes  precedence  over  the
              configuration file.

AUTHOR

       Written  by Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra@troll.no> and copyright 1995 Troll Tech AS, Postboks
       6133 Etterstad, 0602 Oslo, Norway, fax +47 22646949.

       Modified by Cornelius  Krasel  <krasel@wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de>.   Copyright  of  the
       modifications 1997 – 1999.

       Modified Ralf Wildenhues <ralf.wildenhues@gmx.de>. Copyright of the modifications 2002.

       Modified  by Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>. Copyright of the modifications 2002
       – 2004.

       The archive feature was contributed by Andreas Meininger <a.meininger@gmx.net>.

SEE ALSO

       tcpd(8), hosts.allow(5), leafnode(8), fetchnews(8), RFC 977.