Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: anne.jones struggling to find user name of process
Message-ID: <1990Oct20.232536.3331@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Oct18.191538.11392@quagga.uucp>
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 90 23:25:36 GMT

In article <1990Oct18.191538.11392@quagga.uucp> ccfj@quagga.uucp (F.F. Jacot Guillarmod) writes:
>'inews' is the standard cnews version, and the hassle seems to be 
>that the 'anne.jones' shell script can't work out the user name of
>the process running the script.  Does 'anne.jones' assume that inews
>will only ever be run interactively by a real live user?

No, but it is *immensely* difficult to determine the user name in a
reliable and portable way.  Evidently your system is odd enough that
all anne.jones's attempts are failing.

>Secondary problems are the multitude of From:, Sender: and other
>headers...

Part of this may be because just piping mail into inews is *not* generally
workable, because the "From " line that most mailers put at the top is
not a valid news header.  At the very least, you need to strip that off.

You should probably look at the mail-to-news gatewaying stuff we ship
in the "contrib" directory.  It is not as simple as it looks.
-- 
The type syntax for C is essentially   | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
unparsable.             --Rob Pike     |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry