.TH EXPIRE 8
.SH NAME
expire \- remove outdated news articles
.SH SYNOPSIS
.BR /usr/lib/news/expire " [ " \-n
.IR newsgroups " ] [ "
.BR \-i " ] [ " \-I " ] [ " \-v " [ "
.IR level " ] ] [ "
.BI \-e days
 ] 
 [ 
.B \-a
 ] 
.SH DESCRIPTION
.PP
.I Expire
is normally started up by
.IR cron (8)
every night to remove all expired news.
If no newsgroups are specified, the default is to expire
.BR all .
.PP
Articles whose specified expiration date has already passed
are considered expirable.
The
.B \-a
option causes expire to archive articles in /usr/spool/oldnews.
Otherwise, the articles are unlinked.
.PP
The
.B \-v
option causes expire to be more verbose.
It can be given a verbosity level (default 1) as in
.B \-v3
for even more output.
This is useful if articles aren't being expired and you want to know why.
.PP
The
.B \-e
flag gives the number of days to use for a default expiration date.
If not given, an installation dependent default (often 2 weeks) is used.
.PP
The
.B \-i
and
.B \-I
flags
tell
.B expire
to ignore any expiration date explicitly given on articles.
This can be used when disk space is really tight.
The
.B \-I
flag will always ignore expiration dates,
while the
.B \-i
flag will only ignore the date if ignoring it would expire the article sooner.
.I WARNING:
If you have articles archived by giving them expiration dates far into the
future, these options might remove these files anyway.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
checknews(1),
inews(1),
readnews(1),
recnews(8),
sendnews(8),
uurec(8)