Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!tale
From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: rot13
Message-ID: <1989Oct6.054023.4351@rpi.edu>
Date: 6 Oct 89 05:40:23 GMT
References: <877@cbnewsi.ATT.COM>
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Lines: 41

In <877@cbnewsi.ATT.COM> melnik@cbnewsi.ATT.COM (joann.melnik) writes:
Joanne> How do I save (decrypted) an article encrypted in rot13??
Joanne> I use rn, and when I save the article (even though the display is
Joanne> decrypted) it's in rot13 in the saved file?

This topic is loosely addressed in "Answers to Frequently Asked
Questions (Updated: 3  Sep 1989)", one of the regular postings to
news.announce.newusers.  It has this to say:

 6.  How do I decrypt jokes in rec.humor?

     [...] If your system doesn't have a program to encrypt and
     decrypt these, you can quickly create a shell script using "tr": 
	tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m
     On some versions of Unix, the "tr" command should be written as:
	tr "[a-m][n-z][A-M][N-Z]" "[n-z][a-m][N-Z][A-M]"

Now, knowing what command can decrypt the message for you, you can use
the normal features of rn to facilitate this.  For example, you could
type "| tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m > filename".  You probably don't want
to have to remember and type that everytime you want to save a rot13
article though, so you could define a macro to do that.

Just to save a little effort (this is documented in the rn manual
page; refer to it for further information), a suitable macro for
.rnmac could be:

@x %(%m=[ap]?| tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m > %" Save unrotated in file: "\012)

which would, when "@x" is typed at the article or pager level, prompt
for the name of a file in which to save the unrot-13'ed article.  The
filename provided, if not absolute, will be relative to the default
directory (the "-d" switch which can be seen with the "&" summary)
which is typically ~/News.  There might be niftier ways to do this so
it behaves like "s" and "w" as far as arguments are concerned.  Note
that this is untested because I don't use rn.  It also saves the
headers rotated to something pretty incomprehensible.

Dave
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