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From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Minor problems with C news
Message-ID: <1989Jun22.061942.1751@twwells.com>
Date: 22 Jun 89 06:19:42 GMT
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 78

I have had several minor problems with C news. Following is a summary
and suggested fixes.

Some Makefiles have some lines like:

	test ! -r file

These, not having a shell metacharacter, get exec'ed instead of sh
-c'ed. Unfortunately, while test is a builtin, there is no /bin/test
on my system. So those lines fail.

The trivial fix is to put a semicolon at the end of those lines. The
affected Makefiles are in batch, conf, expire, input, and libstdio.

Another set of bugs is in inews. When grepping for Approved:, it does
not redirect the output to /dev/null. Moreover, it tries to remove a
nonexistent temp file immediately after and the rm does not have a -f
flag after it to inhibit an error message. So, moderators get
spurious messages when posting.

In newsrun, the find bad... command prints an error message if there
have been no bad batches in seven days because it tries to rm the
`bad' directory. Since I never get corrupted batches (yay, Telebit!)
this starting giving me a bogus message a week after installation. The
find needs a -type f.

Finally, the stdio stuff provided does not work on my Microport
SysV/386 3.0e. Alternately, there is some, as yet undiscovered bug
elsewhere, that ceases to be apparent when I stop using the stdio.

A gripe: I want to run doexpire when I'm particularly low on disk
space but I want it to do a different expire than is specified by
explist; the script mentions explist explicitly. I might be able to
get a similar effect by fiddling with the parameters in the explist
file, but the documentation left me confused.

Another gripe: I understand using shell scripts all over the place,
though they really slow some things down, but did you *have* to use
awk? It's awkfully slow! And, I think, unnecessary in many places.
For example, I use expr instead in my version of spacefor. Following
is the relevant part of my spacefor (for Microport SysV/386 3.0e):

dfunit=512                      # default unit (bytes)
case "$2" in
incoming)       arg="$NEWSARTS/in.coming"       ; desire=500    ;;
articles)       arg="$NEWSARTS"                 ; desire=2000   ;;
control)        arg="$NEWSCTL"                  ; desire=2000   ;;
outbound)       arg="/usr/spool/uucp"           ; desire=2000   ;;
archive)        arg="$NEWSARTS"                 ; desire=1      ;;
*)              echo "$0: bad type argument \`$2'!!" >&2
		exit 2 ;;
esac

req=`expr \( $1 + $dfunit - 1 \) / $dfunit`
size=`expr \( "\`df $arg\`" : '.*: *\([0-9]*\).*' - $desire \) / $req`
if [ $size -lt 0 ]; then
	echo 0
elif [ $size -gt 10000 ]; then
	echo 10000
else
	echo $size
fi
exit 0

(Note another difference: the original does the computation in terms
of bytes, mine converts the numbers to dfunits and does the
computation in terms of that; this is a minor difference, though one
could argue that mine is the more consistent with reality.)

And a third gripe: putting tab characters anywhere except at the
start of a line causes lots of problems with certain editors (like
mine). These editors have a nasty habit of changing the tabs into
spaces or of displaying them as ^I, in either case causing
difficulties.

---
Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com