expire <subcommand>

The expire command is used to invoke the process which deletes old BBS messages. The mailboxes or newsgroups to be expired, and the age (in days) after which a message may be deleted, are specified in the Expirefile (defaults to /spool/expire.dat). See Also: oldbid

expire [now | interval] Begin the expire process immediately, if <now> is specified, or every <interval> hours in the future (but no immediate expire is done). If no arguments are provided, the current expire interval is displayed.

Expire may also be scheduled at startup. Example: To run expire at 04:30 each morning, place these commands into your AutoexecNosFile

at 0430 "expire 24"
at 0431 "expire now"

If the number of days is omitted, 21 is used. Also, if newsgroups are specified, the associated History file is expired as well, but the number of days used is the maximum of all the days provided for newsgroups in the Expirefile. Example:

```
allusa 7
amsat 10
!swap 10
!rec.radio 7
```