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From: packer@chrpserv.gsfc.nasa.gov (Charles Packer)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: rn as a batch process
Message-ID: <601@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Date: 12 Dec 89 19:52:54 GMT
Sender: news@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov
Reply-To: packer@chrpserv.gsfc.nasa.gov (Charles Packer)
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Organization: Dept. of Independence
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I would like to get all the unread articles from selected newsgroups
into a text file (or files) for processing by another application.
This is easy to do interactively, but I want to do it in =batch=
mode because I don't want to sit at the keyboard all day entering
".-$ s" for each newsgroup and waiting while its messages are
written one by one.

I asked our Sun systems administrators if I could just copy all the
news files without going through rn, but they believe that it can't
be done because the files are on a server, not on the user 
machine.  Beyond that, they couldn't help me.

The obvious way to me to do it, as a VAXian, is to write a command
procedure, or "script" as it's called in Unix, which invokes rn
and feeds it all the commands that I would ordinarily do interactively.
But such a script bombs with an error message: "Caught a SIGSEGV--
.newsrc restored."  I suspect it has something to do with the
fact that rn runs in "cbreak mode." What to do?