Re: disk full <-> Gnus fetching mail

[Bruno Hertz]

Patrick Drechsler <patrick@pdrechsler.de> writes:

> Hi,
>
> which files can I delete without running into too much trouble
> after running into one of those `end of file during parsing
> errors'?
>
> Using the agent, my candidates are:
>
> ~/News/agent/nnimap/.agent*
> ~/News/agent/nnimap/.overview*
> ~/.newsrc*
>
> Background: Gnus is always active (fetching Mails/NG every 10-30
> min). If I fill the rest of the free space on my HD with data
> (the command `df' on unix will show 0) during that time Gnus will
> screw up one of the files above. Resulting in the
> End-of-file-during-parsing-error... somewhere ...
>
> Since my mails are on an IMAP-server I know that nothing is lost
> (except for marking). 
>
> Are there further files to include in a potential
> clean-up-after-disk-is-full script (it has taken me quite some
> time to find ~/News.agent* with filesize *0k*. Deleting it solved
> my problem. Finding it took quite a lot of time)?
>
> Thankful for any advice/pointers

First: don't delete .newsrc.eld (!) It contains your group
subscription data, topic and group configuration, 'seen' flags and
maybe other stuff. So it's essential.

Second: I don't really understand what your purpose is - remove
possibly corrupted files, or just remove some stuff to free up disk
space?

If the former, I frankly don't know how to recognize corrupted files
other than examine them one by one and see whether they look 'good'.

Regarding the latter, afaik removing anything other than 'lib' under
'News/agent' should be OK, if Gnus is not running of course. This
would remove your agent cache, but not the agent configuration.

You could also remove your 'News/cached' directory, but that would
erase your ... cache, of course :) I.e. all articles you've marked as
ticked or dormant, or have explicitly put into the cache by 'M *',
would be gone. And if they have already expired on and vanished from
your news server there's no (easy) way to get them back.

Other than that, I see little more you could do to free up space. But
before doing this, please wait for at least one second
opinion. Although I've played around with Gnus a bit, and use it of
course, I'm definitely no guru. So it would really make sense to get
some confirmation resp. corrections on my suggestions.

Regards, Bruno.