From: utzoo!decvax!duke!unc!smb
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Title: 2.8 expire bug
Article-I.D.: unc.3617
Posted: Sat Jun 26 20:18:08 1982
Received: Mon Jun 28 08:36:38 1982


expire (properly) does not run setuid 'news'; normally, it's invoked as
root by cron.  But when it recreates the history file, the owner then
becomes root.  If your cron has umask set non-zero, this will cause
a non-writable history file to exist, defeating duplicate detection and
preventing expire from ever deleting such articles.  The cleanest fix I
can think of is to have expire set the ownership of the new file.