Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!helps!bigtex!bigtex.cactus.org
From: james@bigtex.cactus.org (James Van Artsdalen)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Why are C news message-IDs so non-minimalist?
Message-ID: <24223@bigtex.cactus.org>
Date: 9 Dec 89 00:32:12 GMT
References: <1989Nov30.162609.9435@phri.nyu.edu> <EZRVsR_00WBFQBElwa@andrew.cmu.edu> <5:CS3_@splut.conmicro.com> <1989Dec3.073310.18501@utz
Sender: james@bigtex.cactus.org
Reply-To: james@bigtex.cactus.org (James Van Artsdalen)
Organization: Institute of Applied Cosmology, Austin TX
Lines: 22
In-reply-to: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)

In <1989Dec6.200813.5267@utzoo.uucp>, henry@utzoo (Henry Spencer) writes:

| In <TM+HD^@b-tech.uucp> zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) writes:
| char	string[] = "!#$%^&*_+|-=~`{}'/?ABCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ1234567890";

> > Anyone using mkid should remove '/' to accommodate this B news bug.  Does
> > anyone foresee any other problems with the character set (even though they
> > are legal according to the rfcs)?

> I would be a little bit nervous about |~`{} due to the obscenities
> sometimes perpetrated when news flows over Bitnet links.

Why go to the effort of finding out what characters won't work, and
instead just don't tempt fate?  I don't feel that irresistible urge to
discover another thousand ways to break news systems world-wide.
I can see no reason to use anything other than alphanumerics.

My failure mode: I run ihave/sendme messages through at(1) to delay
them before sending them out (a 48 hour delay makes ihave/sendme work
nice for backup news feeds).  A while back some mysterious error
messages came from cron.  The problem was that the body of the ihave
was in the at(1) script via "<<", and the shell was interpreting $ and `.