Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: full pathnames in batch files
Message-ID: <1990Oct14.052007.26812@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 90 05:20:07 GMT

At present, C News follows B News practice in that its batcher input files
contain full pathnames of articles.  We do a small optimization in which
the batcher chdirs to /whatever/spool/news at the start, and strips such
a prefix off before using a filename.

We're recently had a suggestion that it would save both space and processing
time if the batcher files contained relative pathnames.  This has merit.
It also lets us take the chdir logic out of the batcher completely, and
move it into the sendbatches shell file that supervises things.  We like
the idea.

There are two possibly-significant impacts on programs using the files.
First, they must be prepared for names relative to /whatever/spool/news.
Second, C News batcher programs no longer get run in the out.going/site
directory for their site, and cannot easily pick up extra control files,
etc., from there.

Is anybody doing anything which would have trouble with this?

(Notably, does anything in NNTP use the batcher files and rely on full
pathnames?)
-- 
"...the i860 is a wonderful source     | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
of thesis topics."    --Preston Briggs |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry