Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!wuarchive!kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!anu-news!list From: munnari!csc.anu.oz.au!gih900@UUNET.UU.NET (Geoff Huston) Newsgroups: news.software.anu-news Subject: RE: NOTIFICATION OF NEW ITEMS AT LOGIN Message-ID: <8910122229.AA19032@uunet.uu.net> Date: 13 Oct 89 13:12:28 GMT Sender: ANU-NEWS Discussion Reply-To: Geoff Huston Lines: 56 X-cc: GIH900@uunet.UU.NET >The problem that faces us is that the user needs to be notified when they >login (or very soon afterwards) that they have new items in *Registered Local* >newsgroups. > >Before we sit down & do some code cutting, has anyone already been there & done >that? If so we would love to hear from you. >Could be something of general interest, so might pay to post back to the >newsgroup. Most of what you are asking for is in NEWS already...From the .HLP file, referring to the qualifiers that may be used with the $ NEWS command :..... /SCAN If this qualifier is present, NEWS will scan the local item area for any unseen items in your registered newsgroups. If any unseen items located NEWS will output a 1 line message indicating that there is NEW news. /SCAN will immediately exit after performing this scan of newsgroups. To alter your LOGIN.COM to output a new News message similar to the new mail message add the entry: $ NEWS/SCAN to LOGIN.COM /ALLSCAN If this qualifier is present, NEWS will scan the local item area for any unseen items in your registered newsgroups. NEWS will output a message for each registered newsgroup which contains unseen items. This is a more verbose form of the /SCAN qualifier. /ALLSCAN will immediately exit after performing this scan of newsgroups. To alter your LOGIN.COM to output a new News message similar to the new mail message add the entry: $ NEWS/ALLSCAN to LOGIN.COM /UNSEEN This qualifier will only invoke an interactive session of NEWS if there are unseen items in registered newsgroups. If there are no such unseen items then NEWS will exit immediately. Otherwise NEWS will invoke an interactive session with the directory screen set to /NEW. i.e /SCAN for a 1 line message (fast) /ALLSCAN for a detailed message indicating which newsgroups (which takes more time). Both these commands refer to REGISTERED newsgroups. If you want to check for REGISTERED LOCAL newsgroups then add additional invocation qualifiers and write a new scan routine routine which is a copy of the existing one with the additonal check for the LOCAL flag being set. Geoff Huston