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From: andrew@calvin.doc.ca (Andrew Patrick)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Getting bnews to notify user of replies.
Message-ID: <1990Nov15.192953.3673@rick.doc.ca>
Date: 15 Nov 90 19:29:53 GMT
References: <224@ncmicro.lonestar.org>
Sender: news@rick.doc.ca
Distribution: news
Organization: Communications Research Centre, Ottawa
Lines: 43
Nntp-Posting-Host: calvin.doc.ca

In article <224@ncmicro.lonestar.org> ltf@ncmicro.lonestar.org
(Lance Franklin) writes:

>Has anybody ever done any work on getting bnews to notify a user on the
>local system when somebody posts a followup to their post?  What I have
>in mind is utilizing the xref capabilities of bnews to recognize when
>a newly-arrived article has a reference to a local posting, and mailing
>to the user that made the post the newsgroup and article-number of the
>followup.  Alternatively, a log of articles which make reference to
>local postings would also be useful.

How about beginning with a simple script that uses find and grep to
search the news spool directories for files newer than a key file,
containing strings like

	*@site.domain

I use a csh script that contains as its heart:

	find . -type f -newer $timefile -exec egrep "$pattern" {} \; \
	-print -exec echo " " \; >>& $outfile

where "pattern" has been defined by:

	set pattern=".*@.*\.doc\.ca"

I run this script once a day from cron and mail the results to active
news readers (it takes about 1 hour running on a Sun Sparcstation 1+).
It shows any references to postings from any of the sites within my
domain.

It's not pretty, but it does the job.

I would love to see what other people have developed to do this.




-- 
Andrew Patrick, Ph.D.       Department of Communications, Ottawa, CANADA
               andrew@calvin.doc.CA    andrew@doccrc.BITNET
        HDTV:  higher resolution, improved colour, wider screen,
            "sit-com" reruns.  What's wrong with this picture?