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Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: The anomolous handling of bad dates in cnews.
Message-ID: <1991May17.054525.1640@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
From: mark@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Mark Davies)
Date: Fri, 17 May 1991 05:45:25 GMT
Sender: news@comp.vuw.ac.nz (News Admin)
References: <1991Apr25.181041.6023@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1991Apr25.223301.27280@world.std.com> <1991May16.211311.3544@eua.ericsson.se>
Organization: Dept. of Comp. Sci., Victoria Uni. of Wellington, New Zealand.
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Originator: mark@the-taj.comp.vuw.ac.nz
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In article <1991May16.211311.3544@eua.ericsson.se>, per@erix.ericsson.se
(Per Hedeland) writes:
|> Btw, regarding inews rejecting articles - as far as I can determine
|> (I tried an article with no Newsgroups: line), inews -W will exit
|> with
|> status 0 even if the posting failed - this causes e.g. NNTP postings
|> to
|> always appear as "successful".

I had this problem under HP-UX 7.0.  I think its a bug in HP-UX's /bin/sh.
The exit status of the subshell is not being correctly passed to the parent.

Since we always invoke inews with the -W option (from nntp) I just made
the following patch to inews.

*** inews.cnews	Wed Apr 17 16:32:11 1991
--- inews	Wed Apr 17 21:37:28 1991
***************
*** 8,13 ****
--- 8,16 ----
  # Yes, it's big, slow and awkward.  The alternative is casting a lot of
  # local policy in C.
  # TODO: rewrite Date: and Expires: dates
+ #
+ # Hacked to effectively always have "-W" on
+ #    so that exit status is reported correctly in hp-ux
  
  # =()<. ${NEWSCONFIG-@<NEWSCONFIG>@}>()=
  . ${NEWSCONFIG-/usr/lib/news/bin/config}
***************
*** 372,378 ****
  	;;
  esac
  exit $status				# trap 0 may cleanup, make dead.article
! ) &
! eval $waitcmd				# wait & get status if -W given
  trap 0					# let the background run on unmolested
  exit $status
--- 375,381 ----
  	;;
  esac
  exit $status				# trap 0 may cleanup, make dead.article
! ) 
! status=$?			# wait & get status if -W given
  trap 0					# let the background run on unmolested
  exit $status


cheers
mark