
Okay, I think maybe I am on the proper approach to expiring news...

My problem is that I like to keep news around for as long as possible,
and only expire it when disk space warrents it. Manually expiring news
isn't much of a hassle, besides, this way I get to watch what the program
does -- thus saving me a weekly movie ticket.

Anyways, I've never been able to figure out just HOW many days past should
be expired and still keep about 3 meg of news around... As with all unix
problems, I created a shell script.

The attached shell script will look at your news spool dir and figure
out how many bytes it recieved on each day, then it compares that with
a normal-queue-size and tells you how many days should be expired in 
order to return your queue to a normal size. Did I explain that properly?

Ahh, yeah, sounds right to me. Anyways, the attached script doesn't run
expire and does nothing more then report, but it can be adapted to
generate an expire command line (with a pipe to /bin/sh).

The shell script is also rather primative and UGLY -- but it seams to work
out fairly well. I've testing on a Pyramid (UCB mode) and all works okay,
and I see no reason why it won't work on other UNIX's.

If anyone has another approach please let me know as I would love to
see how others solve the same problem.

OH!! 
It should be noted that dates reported by ''ls'' and ''date'' are
converted into a julian number so there is some easy way to do math
on dates. For this reason, Dec 23 will be converted to three hundred
and something. If the script tells you to expire news  over three hundred
and something days, then your threshold was found to be in December;
Otherwise, if nobody ''touch''s the news files, and if expire really
works on the TRUE date the files was created on your local system,
(ps: does it??) then everything is ok.

