Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!bellcore!rutgers!apple!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!tale
From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Looking up an article by number in rn (was: Cancelling Post)
Message-ID: <1989Sep21.232001.14698@rpi.edu>
Date: 21 Sep 89 23:20:01 GMT
References: <1918@hydra.gatech.EDU> <3453@midway.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Lines: 48
In-Reply-To: jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk's message of 21 Sep 89 16:13:49 GMT

In <3453@midway.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
Jack> What I do in situations like this is look in the spool
Jack> directories; here, your article is the file
Jack> /usr/spool/news/news/newusers/questions/107 (use "egrep" or
Jack> something similar).  Having found it, edit your .newsrc file to
Jack> fool "rn" into believing you haven't read it; i.e. I'd change
Jack> the line
Jack> 	news.newusers.questions: 1-110
Jack> to read
Jack> 	news.newusers.questions: 1-106,108-110
 
It is horrendously funny the contortions people sometimes go through
for whatever reason -- to avoid learning, for using what they know,
to avoid manuals, whatever.  This is not a flame; I don't flame people
that give me such a good laugh as this.

If you know the article number, just type it in at an article prompt,
or the end-of-group prompt.  At the group prompt for that group you
can type '.' and then the number because . says to execute the command
as though you typed it at an article prompt.

You don't even know that article number?  Forget about egrep for this
particular situation.  If it's a previously read article, which is how
I believe this thread started, you can use the ? command with the r
(and possibly h) modifiers.  r says to scan read articles, h says to
scan all of the headers.  You might also be interested in 'm' or 'M'
modifies to mark the whole group found as unread, so you can look at a
group of multiple matches if desired.   For example, "?phwup?m" would
search all articles, read or not ('m' and 'M' happen to imply 'r') and
mark them as unread such that I could then page through the articles
that had "phwup" in their Subject: line.

Modern newsreaders (those that have come since "readnews" and "vnews")
tend to be pretty powerful without calling on extra shell programmes
and .newsrc editing to see what you want to see.  Take a little extra
time to go over manuals for them; you might well be pleasantly
surprised to find features you never knew existed.

            A little learning is a dangerous thing;
            Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
            There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
            And drinking largely sobers us again.
                             -- Alexander Pope,
                             "An Essay On Criticism"

Dave
--
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