Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!mica.berkeley.edu!wisner
From: wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: Filler lines
Message-ID: <30792@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 21 Aug 89 19:03:28 GMT
References: <21376@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: Earl's Reptile Farm and Cheesy Dinosaur Park
Lines: 20

>                             Some netters say that adding
>filler lines to fake it is "bad", and that a better way is
>to change to > citation character to something that doesn't
>get counted as an included line.

As J said, the best solution is not to quote so bloody much of previous
articles. On USENET, brevity is golden.

But if you really must quote a huge chunk of someone else's article, and
you decide to change the > characters to something else to fool inews, please,
at least make sure you don't muck up your References line. Every commonly
used UNIX editor I know of allows the user to use regular expressions in
search-and-replace commands; so, instead of saying "change > into <" try
saying "change ^> into <". (For the uninitiated, a caret at the beginning
of a regular expression matches the beginning of a line, so ^> will only
match carets at the beginning of lines -- not those at the end of message
IDs.)

In vi, you can use :g/^>/s//</ (incomprehensible, but effective).
In emacs, you can use vi. (cf. alt.religion.computers)