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Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site watcgl.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!watcgl!dmmartindale
From: dmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.eunice
Subject: Re: Origin of the name grep (actually Eunice!)
Message-ID: <17@watcgl.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 15-Sep-84 11:40:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: watcgl.17
Posted: Sat Sep 15 11:40:27 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Sep-84 23:44:34 EDT
References: <1082@t4test.UUCP> <1084@t4test.UUCP>, <341@genrad.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 21

An example of a fairly simple way to let Eunice-based B news handle postings
to multiple newsgroups:  When an article comes in, store the body of it
in the appropriate place for one of the newsgroups, and for each of the
other groups it was posted to create a file containing a "magic token"
followed by the pathname of the file containing the body of the article.
Since the first byte of a stored news article is always a capital letter
(because it is the first character of a header line of some sort),
any special character would do as the "magic token".  Readnews then
need only look at the first byte of an article file to determine if it
is a real article, or a file containing a pathname which should be read
in and then opened to obtain the real article.

This should involve only minor changes to inews and readnews.
Implementing this should require only slightly more effort than went into
the letters that we've seen so far explaining why stock B news doesn't
work properly on Eunice and why we thus shouldn't post to multiple newsgroups.

This scheme won't work right in situations where different newsgroups
are expired in differing lengths of time, since you lose UNIX's "all links
have equal status" property.  But then, it only required about 30 seconds
to think of - you should be able to do better with a bit more thought.