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From: laird@slum.MV.COM (Laird Heal)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Need a way to "take home" unread articles
Summary: remember readnews?
Message-ID: <1990Sep24.063708.1284@slum.MV.COM>
Date: 24 Sep 90 06:37:08 GMT
References: <1990Sep22.023944.2535@smsc.sony.com>
Reply-To: samsung!slum!laird
Organization: dis
Lines: 64

In article <1990Sep22.023944.2535@smsc.sony.com> dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott) writes:
>I need a program that, given a .newsrc file and the active file,
>produce a listing of all the files containing the articles that have
>not been read.

Maybe you want to feed yourself just those articles that you haven't read
before; maybe you want to 'reply' and carry a tape of replies back to the
original site for semi-automatic responses.

I used to use readnews -p -n comp.sys.mac to pump all of the articles down
the wire to me when I dialed in at 2400 baud.  I later got sophisticated and
piped it through compress in the background and then sz'd the result, when
the phone bills got too high.

The man page for readnews shows a -l argument "Only the titles output.  The
.newsrc file will not be updated. (where -e also updates the .newsrc file)

A trial run here of

[$] readnews -l -n news.newsites 

produced

news.newsites/23     Updated map entry for seque.com

That was the only article; that group gets spun into a file along with my
maps in case I ever get ambitious and then I expire the entries.

You would have to do a wee bit of work with sed to produce the list of files,
something like

readnews -e -n news.newsites | sed 's/ .*$//' | sed 's/\./\//' 

and prepend the name of your favorite news spool directory.  
Hmm.  The above even worked.
>
>I want to be able to take the list of files and generate a tar tape
>that I can take home and put on my machine to read there.  Since the
>article numbers will be the same, it will make my .newsrc file
>transferrable between home and work.

Now getting those files into tar might be a little tougher.  Every time
I have tried to put more than about 100 file names into the shell, the
shell has asked me to rephrase my question.  Maybe appending to a tar
archive is working in your system; mine says:  sorry, Charlie, no -a.

One ugly solution is to cpio the files into a temporary directory, and 
tar them from there.  This is ugly because it copies the files on disk 
one extra time.

If I were doing this, I would get feeds batched and tote the batches.  You'll 
probably feed replies back via uucp, they should be short.  Doing that, 
incidentally, will throw your one-to-one correspondence off a little.  Your 
replies will have to be overlaid by new articles off the tapes; they will of 
course be somewhere on the tape as well, so they will not get lost.

While readnews does not cut down on the interactive finger-flicking the
way rn, nn, anon [sic] do, I considered it useful enough to install here
even though C News is doing my transport, and at the moment providing me
endless entertainment.  

-- 
Laird Heal	laird@slum.MV.COM	The world is my office.
(Salem, NH)	+1 603 898 1406	<-----I charge for opinions, though.