Autzoo.901
net.news
utzoo!henry
Mon Aug 17 23:28:26 1981
better rnews
People who keep a lot of news articles around (and hence have an rnews
which runs rather slowly) may have noticed that if rnews gets "news
system locked up", it can lose the incoming news.  Here is a simple
way to prevent this:  make the link to "news" be "realrnews" instead
of "rnews", and make "rnews" the following shellfile:

	tee /tmp/rn$$ | realrnews $* >/tmp/rnm$$ 2>&1
	if test -s /tmp/rnm$$
	then
		( echo rnews ; cat /tmp/rnm$$ /tmp/rn$$ ) | mail uucp
	fi
	rm -f /tmp/rn$$ /tmp/rnm$$

This assumes that the news/network administrator checks uucp's
mailbox occasionally.

We also use an almost-identical shellfile for "rmail", to catch mail
sent through us to nonexistent destinations etc.  The "$*" in the
above is actually unnecessary for rnews, but rmail obviously needs it.