Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site denelcor.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!seismo!hao!denelcor!neal From: neal@denelcor.UUCP (Neal Weidenhofer) Newsgroups: net.news Subject: readnews questions Message-ID: <381@denelcor.UUCP> Date: Thu, 5-Apr-84 20:36:14 EST Article-I.D.: denelcor.381 Posted: Thu Apr 5 20:36:14 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 7-Apr-84 06:08:37 EST Organization: Denelcor, Aurora, CO Lines: 28 ************************************************************************** Many thanks to all of those who offered help and suggestions with the problems I had with readnews. Here is what I found out. 1. Unsubscribe was slow because I was working with a clean .newsrc file. Whenever our version of readnews goes to a group that isn't mentioned in .newsrc, it tries to open (or stat--I heard both and I haven't had the time to check) each file by number until it finds one that exists. As it turned out, the group I was trying to unsubscribe which took 25 minutes was net.jobs. Net.jobs is followed by net.jokes with somewhat more than 5000 expired entries. Now I know how long it takes to do 5000 unsuccessful opens (or stats). A fix for this problem has been posted (not by me). 2. The reason the "cp .newsrc x" was failing in the shell script immediately after readnews is apparently the fact that readnews forks a new process to update .newsrc and exits so that the terminal is freed sooner. In any case, the NEWSRC environment variable did the trick for me. Ln would probably have worked also but this is cleaner. Thanks again and I apologize for taking so long to answer. Regards, Neal Weidenhofer Denelcor, Inc. !denelcor!neal