Xref: utzoo news.software.b:5680 news.admin:10544
Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!attcan!lsuc!eci386!woods
From: woods@eci386.uucp (Greg A. Woods)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.admin
Subject: Re: C news shell script questions
Summary: how do I know you are running C News?
Message-ID: <1990Sep6.175608.27743@eci386.uucp>
Date: 6 Sep 90 17:56:08 GMT
References: <1990Sep4.144525.7423@wrl.dec.com> <1990Sep4.165941.26080@zoo.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: woods@eci386.UUCP (Greg A. Woods)
Organization: Elegant Communications, Inc.
Lines: 43

In article <1990Sep4.165941.26080@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
> In article <1990Sep4.144525.7423@wrl.dec.com> reid@wrl.dec.com (Brian Reid) writes:
> >What code can I put in a shell script that will determine that a site is
> >running C news?
> 
> Hmm.  Aside from the obvious question of knowing where the news directories
> are, it should not be too hard.  One reasonable approach would be to look
> for /usr/lib/news/mailname, a file that is normally a required part of
> C News (it's used to generate From: lines in inews) and doesn't exist in
> B News that I know of.

Personally I'd prefer it if the file used for such identification was
either one used by both the C programmes and shell scripts, or else
one common enough to be consistent on many sites.

Paul Vixie's suggestion of explist would be bad for several sites I
know of, where doexpire has been modified to use a succession of files
in explist.d.

I don't know how many people have changed inews enough to invalidate
Henry's choice of mailname, but even if the number is zero, my
reasoning should still hold.

How about "/usr/lib/news"/bin/config?  Or maybe "/usr/lib"/newsbin?

I would say the biggest problem will be finding the news directories.
The only way we've done that is by looking in several obvious places,
with a preferred order.  That still won't work for sites that have so
little imagination that they mount partitions on places like
"/usr2/lib/news".  You can probably try these in the given order:
	/usr/lib/news		(the de-facto standard way)
	/usr/local/lib/news	(my preference)
	/usr/local/news		(quite common in my experience)
	/local/lib/news		(quite common too, and my second choice)
	/local/news
	/var/lib/news		(though these are usually just symlinks)
	/var/news
though I'm sure there are many more possibilites than one can list.
-- 
						Greg A. Woods

woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP
+1-416-443-1734 [h]  +1-416-595-5425 [w]    VE3-TCP	Toronto, Ontario CANADA