EXPIRE.CTL(5)

NAME
expire.ctl - control file for Usenet article expiration

DESCRIPTION
The file <pathetc in inn.conf>/expire.ctl is the default control file for the expire(8) program, which reads it at start-up. It serves two purposes: it defines how long history entries for expired or rejected articles are retained, and it determines how long articles not stored in a self-expiring storage method are retained. If all of the storage methods used by the server are self-expiring (such as CNFS), only the /remember/ setting described below is necessary or used.

Blank lines and lines beginning with a number sign (``#'') are ignored. All other lines should be in one of two formats.

The first format specifies how long to keep history entries for articles that aren't present in the news spool. These are articles which have either already expired out of all newsgroups or which the server rejected (and ``remembertrash'' was set to true in inn.conf(5)). There should only be one line in this format, which looks like:
    /remember/:days
where days is a floating-point number that specifies the minimum number of days a history record of a given message ID is retained, regardless of whether the article has expired. (History entries are always retained at least until an article fully expires.)

The reason to retain a record of an old articles is to handle the case where a peer offers old articles that were previously accepted and then expired. Without a setting like this, the server would accept the article again and readers would see duplicate articles. Articles older than a certain number of days won't be accepted by the server at all (see the ``-c'' flag of innd(8)), and this setting should probably match that time period (14 days by default) to ensure the server never accepts duplicates.

This setting does not affect article expirations.

Most of the lines in this file will be in the second format, five colon-separated fields as follows:
    pattern:modflag:keep:default:purge
The pattern field is a list of wildmat(3)-style patterns, separated by commas. This field specifies the newsgroups to which the line is applied. Note that the file is interpreted in order and the last line that matches will be used, so general patterns (like a single asterisk to set the defaults) should appear at the beginning of the file, before more specific settings.

The modflag field can be used to further limit newsgroups to which the line applies, and should be chosen from the following set:
    M	Only moderated groups
    U	Only unmoderated groups
    A	All groups
    X	Removes the article from all groups that it appears in
(The X flag is special; normally articles are not completely deleted until they expire out of every group they were posted to, but if an article is expired by a line with an X, it is deleted out of all newsgroups it was posted to immediately.)

The next three fields are used to determine how long an article should be kept. Each field should be either a number of days (fractions like ``8.5'' are allowed) or the word ``never.'' The most common use is to specify the default value for how long an article should be kept. The first and third fields — keep and purge — specify the boundaries within which an Expires header will be honored. They are ignored if an article has no Expires header. (In other words, if an article has an Expires header, and the time at which the header says it should expire is sooner than the default field, the Expires header is be honored instead. Similarly, if the Expires header specifies a time longer than the default field, it is honored instead. But articles are expired no faster than the time set with keep and kept no longer than the time specified with purge regardless of Expires headers). One should think of the fields as ``lower-bound default upper-bound.'' Since most articles do not have explicit expiration dates, the second field tends to be the most important and most commonly applied one.

The keep field specifies how many days an article should be kept before it will be removed. No article in the matching newsgroups will be removed if it has been filed for less then keep days, regardless of any expiration date. If this field is the word ``never,'' no article in the matching newsgroups will ever be expired.

The default field specifies how long to keep an article if no Expires header is present. If this field is the word ``never'' then articles without explicit expiration dates will never be expired.

The purge field specifies the upper bound on how long an article can be kept. No article will be kept longer then the number of days specified by this field. All articles will be removed after then have been kept for purge days. If purge is the word ``never'' then the article will never be deleted.

If you have turned on the storage manager with the ``storageapi'' in inn.conf(5) option and you don't the use ``-c'' option with expire, or if overview data for the article is not created, then you will need to use a slightly different format for specifying expiration times for storage classes:
    classnum:keep:default:purge
Where classnum is the number that you specified in storage.conf(5). The rest of the fields are identical to the 5 field format. If the line for classnum is not defined, keep, default and purge are assumed to be all ``0''.

It is often useful to honor the expiration headers in articles, especially those in moderated groups. To do this, set keep to zero, default to whatever value you wish, and purge to never (or alternately set purge to some large number, like 365 days for a maximum article life of a year). To ignore any Expires header, set all three fields to the same value.

There must be exactly one line with a pattern of ``*'' and a modflags of ``A'' — this matches all groups and is used to set the expiration default. It should be the first expiration line.

EXAMPLES
##  How long to keep expired history
/remember/:5
##  Most things stay for two weeks
*:A:14:14:14
##  Believe expiration dates in moderated groups, up to six weeks
*:M:1:30:42
##  Keep local stuff for a long time
foo.*:A:30:30:30

HISTORY
Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews.

SEE ALSO
expire(8), inn.conf(5), storage.conf(5), wildmat(3).