Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!coolidge
From: coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: Useful NNTP Patch
Summary: I hate following myself up!
Keywords: nntpxmit speedup
Message-ID: <1989Sep1.041556.6041@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 1 Sep 89 04:15:56 GMT
References: <237@wugate.wustl.edu> <47388@oliveb.olivetti.com> <1989Aug31.231451.21630@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu
Reply-To: coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Organization: U of Illinois, CS Dept., Systems Research Group
Lines: 22

I write:
>Spaces are illegal in both
>pathnames and messageID's, so the space is a unique separator.

Of course this isn't true, as was pointed out to me via e-mail. Pathnames
can indeed have spaces. MessageID's, however, cannot have either spaces or
left angle brackets (other than the required starting bracket), and must close
with a right angle bracket, so as long as the filename is not of the form
/news/path/text <stuff>
(where the < is part of the filename, not a shell command), then the
proposed system implemented by the patch is safe. As long as a news
filename never includes the sequence "space left-angle-bracket"  the
system should still be safe, since space left-angle-bracket would then
be unambiguously the start of a messageid. I doubt that restriction is
likely to bother implementors too much :-)

--John

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1989 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.