Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!aplcen!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!hacgate!ashtate!dbase!dveditz
From: dveditz@dbase.UUCP (Dan Veditz)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: Killing messages
Message-ID: <330@dbase.UUCP>
Date: 12 Dec 89 22:12:17 GMT
References: <12083@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: dveditz@dbase.A-T.COM (Dan Veditz)
Organization: Ashton Tate Devlopment Center Glendale, Calif.
Lines: 38

In article <12083@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> jmdoyle@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Jennifer Doyle) writes:
>Here's a strange question: How do I kill off all articles from a certain
>news group? Let me explain. We have a group here called junk. Any article
>posted to a group that has not been newgrouped here ends up in junk. The
>problem is I have to plow through a lot of articles I don't want to read.


The answers posted so far don't seem to match your question -- Those 
tell you how to delete *everything*, and I got the impression that 
you wanted to delete everything but a (few?) certain group(s).

I'm going to assume you are using "rn" -- if you're not, sorry, can't
help (it helps to include what software you're using and what version 
level -- this applies to any computer related plea for help, something
like telling an auto mechanic the year and model).

For the sake of example I'm going to assume you want to get rid of
everything except articles for alt.callahans (I've seen you there, and
it's a new enough group that it probably falls into junk on some machines).

When you're on the first new article in junk, type

     /alt\.callahans/h:M
     c y

The first command will look for all occurances of alt.callahans
in article headers (the h) and will mark them *un*read (the capital
M is important as articles marked with the lowercase m will go away
when the 'c' command is used).  The next line will now mark all 
the rest of the articles as read.  Now quit from junk and re-enter 
it, and only the alt.callahans articles will be there.

If you want to get fancy you can put a variant of this in your KILL
file (see "man rn" for variations on the above and for KILL files).

-Dan
uunet!ashtate!dveditz
dveditz@ashtate.A-T.COM