Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!ginosko!hubdub!rand
From: RAND@merrimack.edu (Rand P. Hall)
Newsgroups: news.software.anu-news
Subject: Re: NOTIFICATION OF NEW ITEMS AT LOGIN
Message-ID: <8291@merrimack.edu>
Date: 13 Oct 89 09:59:19 GMT
References: <1197@mof.govt.nz> <14406@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <2108@unocss.UUCP>
Organization: Merrimack College, No. Andover, MA
Lines: 29

In article <2108@unocss.UUCP>, fritz@unocss.UUCP (Tim Russell) writes:
>      Bleah..  I dare say that the original poster wants a specific program
> that only shows registered, local groups.  He probably also wants something
> faster than NEWS/SCAN.
> 
>      Here, we use a newsgroup to communicate announcements/etc to the
> user room consulting staff..  A small FAST program to notify the user of
> messages in certain groups would definitely be appreciated.  Alas, I
> don't have time to write it.  NEWS/SCAN just isn't an option when you log
> in and out as often as we do and NEWS takes around 30 seconds to start up..

Am I overlooking something or is this a simple solution to the problem
at hand:

Write a command procedure or hll program to:

get the last mod date of newsrc.;
loop:
 read record from newsrc.;
 if newsgroup is local       !you do organize local groups logically, yes?
 and field2 is 1 then        !registered
  look at each file in [NEWS.newsgroup] and compare date to date(newsrc.;)
 goto loop

Am I lost, or what?

Rand P. Hall                    UUCP: {uunet,bbn,ulowell}!ginosko!hubdub!rand
Merrimack College               CSNET: rand@merrimack.edu
N. Andover, MA 508.683.7111     Dukakis = 15% tax hike + $1.3 billion deficit