Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site persci.UUCP
Path: utzoo!decvax!tektronix!uw-beaver!tikal!cholula!persci!bill
From: bill@persci.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Slight problems, wishes, with rn
Message-ID: <261@persci.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Jul-85 13:17:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: persci.261
Posted: Tue Jul 23 13:17:05 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Jul-85 12:07:26 EDT
Reply-To: bill@persci.UUCP (Bill Swan)
Distribution: na
Organization: Personal Scientific, Woodinville WA
Lines: 26
Xref: tektronix net.news:03353 

I have run into a slight problem with 'rn'. I haven't figured out how to
re-read a newsgroup yet (I'm sure it's in the documentation, but I haven't
ferreted it out yet), so I have had to use 
> %readnews -x -r -n newsgroup
to re-read articles in specific groups. (If someone knows how to do this
in rn, please let me know..)

Yesterday, I got an error message from readnews, saying 'line too long'. I
exited and tried to check my .newsrc with vi, only to get the same message!
I was surprised to see how rn collects article numbers (I had a *LOT* of
gaps in the sequencing in a number of newsgroups, causing a very long list
of read articles to be generated. Not finding anything in the documentation
on how to clean this up, I wrote the following script to do the job:
> #!/bin/csh -f
> sed 's/^\([^ ]* [0-9]*\)[,-].*[,-]\([0-9]*\)$/\1-\2/' <.newsrc >.tmpnewsrc
> /bin/mv .newsrc .oldnewsrc
> /bin/mv .tmpnewsrc .newsrc
(This script takes a list of numbers, separated by commas or dashes, and
replaces the list with the first and last numbers, separated by a dash.)
It worked (just fine), but seemed like a kludge.

Mt question is, can rn do this same kind of cleanup (so I don't have to run
this script periodically), or am I doing something wrong with rn that it
generates long lists of marked articles? Also, what are the commands to read
an already read newsgroup, in reverse, as in '%readnews -x -r -n newsgroup'
(without editing .newsrc)?