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From: mark@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Mark Davies)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: newshist problem?
Message-ID: <1991Jun02.012157.18432@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Date: 2 Jun 91 01:21:57 GMT
References: <1991May30.194402.24916@ucselx.sdsu.edu> <1991May31.000943.10583@comp.vuw.ac.nz> <1991Jun1.193655.544@iWarp.intel.com>
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In article <1991Jun1.193655.544@iWarp.intel.com>, merlyn@iWarp.intel.com
(Randal L. Schwartz) writes:
|> Gack.  Starting a sh that did a bunch of echoes seemed a little
|> wasted, so I did it in Perl.  (The whole thing shows a zillion
|> syscalls with trace, so there's bound to be a few more
|> optimizations.)

Thanks Randal.  That was the obvious next step.  My only excuse is that
my copy of the Perl book was on loan at that time.

Here is a small patch to your code to handle Message-IDs that contain
"`" and other sh meta chars.
With your current version you get
	"sh: syntax error at line 2: `newline or ;' unexpected"
and similar messages popping out on standard error.

cheers
mark

ps.  Aren't ambiguious date formats fun (see below entries in the
revision history).

*** 4696	Sun Jun  2 12:17:41 1991
--- nstats	Sun Jun  2 12:55:32 1991
***************
*** 71,76 ****
--- 71,79 ----
  #			that it is a shell script
  # 06/01/91      merlyn@iWarp.intel.com
  #                       replaced mark's shell script with Perl code
+ # 02/06/91      mark@comp.vuw.ac.nz
+ #                       fix randal's code to handle Message-IDs
+ #                       of the form <`=C*~5+@cck.cov.ac.uk>
  #
  ############################################################
  
***************
*** 84,90 ****
      grep(!/</ && s/.*/<$&>/, @ids);
      local($ids) = join("\n",@ids);
      open(newshist, "-|") || exec <<"PERL_EOF";
! /usr/lib/newsbin/dbz -ix /usr/lib/news/history <<SH_EOF
  $ids
  SH_EOF
  PERL_EOF
--- 87,93 ----
      grep(!/</ && s/.*/<$&>/, @ids);
      local($ids) = join("\n",@ids);
      open(newshist, "-|") || exec <<"PERL_EOF";
! /usr/lib/newsbin/dbz -ix /usr/lib/news/history <<'SH_EOF'
  $ids
  SH_EOF
  PERL_EOF