Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!ziploc!eps
From: eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: Fetching msgs by their IDs
Summary: Maybe something like this will help
Message-ID: <172@toaster.SFSU.EDU>
Date: 2 Dec 89 11:58:00 GMT
References: <566@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> <5290@omepd.UUCP>
Reply-To: eps@cs.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Organization: San Francisco State University
Lines: 61

This is a quick late-night "10-minute hack" to look up message IDs.
It works on my system, it may need a little work on yours.  It's
faster than searching in rn, and will work even if the referenced
article was in a different newsgroup, and redirected followups.
(It has to be executed on the machine that keeps the history, so
it's not really useful if you are using client NFS or NNTP).

					-=EPS=-
-------
/*
 * Print B News history record for specified message-ids
 * Eric P. Scott, SFSU, December 1989
 */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <dbm.h>
#ifndef HIST
#define HIST "/usr/lib/news/history"
#endif

main(argc, argv)
int argc;
char *argv[];
{
	register int i, c;
	register FILE *f;
	datum k, d;

#ifdef USG
	char *malloc();
	setbuf(stdout, malloc(BUFSIZ));
#endif
	if (argc<2) {
		fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s \"<message-id>\" ...\n\
\t(note that message-ids are normally folded to lowercase in history)\n", *argv);
		exit(1);
	}
	if (dbminit(HIST)<0) {
		perror("can't open history database");
		exit(1);
	}
	f=(FILE *)NULL;
	i=1; do {
		k.dsize=strlen(k.dptr=argv[i++])+1;
		d=fetch(k);
		if (d.dptr&&(d.dsize==sizeof (long))) {
			if (!f&&!(f=fopen(HIST, "r"))) {
				perror(HIST);
				exit(1);
			}
			(void)fseek(f, *(long *)d.dptr, 0);
			while ((c=getc(f))>=' '||c=='\t') putchar(c);
			putchar('\n');
		}
		else printf("%s not found\n", k.dptr);
	} while (i<argc);
	if (f) fclose(f);
#ifdef DBZ
	dbmclose();
#endif
	exit(0);
}