Newsbeuter: purge articles from a given feed

Newsbeuter is a great CLI feedreader, which relies on a sqlite database to store information. Thus, it is possible to overcome missing features by directly updating the database.

I have some frequently updated feeds (say, more than 20 new items a day) for which the archive are useless to me and I would like to be able to delete some or all of the articles at once, but Newsbeuter only offers a per-article command (“D”, by default, for delete-article), missing a “delete-feed-read” command which would delete all read items. Here is the command to remove all unread articles older than 10 days:

sqlite3 ~/.cache/newsbeuter/cache.db <<< "DELETE FROM rss_item WHERE feedurl LIKE 'http://www.example.com/feed' AND unread = 1 AND pubDate < ( SELECT strftime('%s','now') - (10*86400));";

Just replace:

• ~/.cache/newsbeuter/cache.db by the path where newsbeuter stores its db on your machine
• http://www.example.com/feed by the url of the feed you’d like update
• 10 in 10*86400 by a number of days

If I have time someday, I should fill in a feature request…