Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site floyd.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!gummo!whuxlb!floyd!trb
From: trb@floyd.UUCP (Andy Tannenbaum)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: undocumented feature for saving netnews
Message-ID: <1968@floyd.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-Sep-83 17:59:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: floyd.1968
Posted: Wed Sep 14 17:59:18 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 15-Sep-83 06:04:16 EDT
Organization: Bell Labs, Whippany, NJ
Lines: 29

If you save a lot of netnews, your $NEWSDIR directory probably gets
pretty large.  You probably wish that there was a way to sort all
those files into appropriate subdirectories.

Wish no more.  There is an undocumented feature in netnews (since at
least 2.10.1) which sorts your saved netnews by newsgroup.  Here's how
it works:

I set my NEWSDIR environment variable to ~trb/newsdir/%s.  Netnews
replaces the %s with the current newsgroup for the message using
sprintf, which is cute, because if you don't have a %s in your
NEWSDIR variable then sprintf doesn't mind.

This way, when I'm reading net.cooks, and I save an article in the file
called souffle, it saves it in /usr/trb/newsdir/net.cooks/souffle.

Note that netnews will not create the directory for you.  If the save
fails, you can do a !mkdir and try again.  For starters, it's useful
to get a list of all active newsgroups and do a mkdir `cat
activelist`.  You can make activelist by stripping the article numbers
out of /usr/lib/news/active.  Note that the hierarchy is like old
style news, the net.cooks articles will go into net.cooks/souffle, not
net/cooks/souffle.

This works in vnews (if the vnews is compiled with the .o's from a
late model netnews) but it doesn't work with the 2.10.1 digestifier,
though that would be easily fixed.

	Andy Tannenbaum   Bell Labs  Whippany, NJ   (201) 386-6491