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There is a special syntax for creating the entire banks of devices for a hard drive:


hd[a-d] 8/64

What this means is as follows: Create hda, and eight partitions on hda (hda1 through hda8), starting with minor number 0. Then create hdb, and eight partitions, starting with minor number 64. Then hdc, and so on, with minor number 64*2 = 128—and so forth. These are automatically placed in the class disk. The necessary groups and batches are created so you can ask MAKEDEV to create hd or hda or hda1 and expect it to do the correct thing.

Note that simple arithmetic is permitted for specifying the minor device number, as this often makes things much clearer and less likely to be accidentally broken.

SEE ALSO

MAKEDEV(8), MAKEDEV.cfg(5)

Version 1.4, January 1995

environ

environ—User environment.

SYNOPSIS


extern char **environ;

DESCRIPTION

An array of strings called the environment is made available by exec(2) when a process begins. By convention, these strings have the form name=value. Common examples are

USER The name of the logged-in user (used by some BSD-derived programs).
LOGNAME The name of the logged-in user (used by some System-V derived programs).
HOME A user's login directory, set by login(1) from the password filepasswd(5).
LANG The name of a locale to use for locale categories when not overridden by LC_ALL or more
specific environment variables.
PATH The sequence of directory prefixes that sh(1) and many other programs apply in searching
for a file known by an incomplete pathname. The prefixes are separated by :.
SHELL The filename of the user's login shell.
TERM The terminal type for which output is to be prepared.

Further names maybe placed in the environment by the export command and name=value in sh(1) or by the setenv command if you use csh(1). Arguments may also be placed in the environment at the point of an exec(2).

It is risky practice to set name=value pairs that conflict with well-known shell variables. Setting these could cause surprising behavior in subshells or system(3) commands.

SEE ALSO


login(1), sh(1), bash(1), csh(1), tcsh(1), exec(2),system(3)

Linux, 21 October 1996

expire.ctl

expire.ctl—Control file for Usenet article expiration.

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DESCRIPTION

The file /news/lib/expire.ctl is the default control file for the expire(8) program, which reads it at startup. 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 a record of fully expired articles. This is useful when a newsfeed intermittently offers older news that is not kept around very long. (The case of very old news is handled by the _c flag of innd(8).) There should only be one line in this format, which looks like this:


/remember/:days

Where days is a floating-point number that specifies the upper limit to remember a Message-ID, even if the article has already expired. (It does not affect article expirations.)

Most of the lines in the file will consist of five colon-separated fields, as follows:


pattern:modflag:keep:default:purge

The pattern field is comma-separated set of single wildmat(3)-style patterns that specify the newsgroups to which the rest of the line applies. Because the file is interpreted in order, the most general patterns should be specified first, and the most specific patterns should be specified last.

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

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 such as 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. The fields are specified in the file as "lower-bound default upper-bound," and they are explained in this order. Because most articles do not have explicit expiration dates, however, the second field tends to be the most important one.

The keep field specifies how many days an article should be kept before it will be removed. No article in the newsgroup will be removed if it has been filed for less than keep days, regardless of any expiration date. If this field is the word never, then an article cannot have been kept for enough days so it will never 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 than the number of days specified by this field. All articles will be removed after they have been kept for purge days. If purge is the word never, then the article will never be deleted.

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 want, and purge to never. 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. For example:


## 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

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