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From: malloy@ittral.UUCP (William P. Malloy)
Newsgroups: net.news.b,net.news.adm
Subject: Checkgroups messages not working (fix?)
Message-ID: <188@ittral.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 29-Jul-85 13:20:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ittral.188
Posted: Mon Jul 29 13:20:00 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Aug-85 05:23:47 EDT
Reply-To: malloy@ittral.UUCP (William P. Malloy)
Organization: ITT-B&CC Engineering Group
Lines: 37
Keywords: rn, inews
Xref: watmath net.news.b:1149 net.news.adm:335

I have attempted several times to run the checkgroups script that Gene Spafford
posts to net.news.group every month, and always with the same results.  It tells
me that ALL the newsgroups are invalid.  Well I finally had sometime to look at
it and discovered that the checkgroups shell script expects a list of the
currently valid net wide groups to come from standard input.  Looking at the 
code for inews in the source file control.c, inside c_checkgroups(),  I find
the lines below assume there is a copy of the prototype article in the
temporary file ARTICLE = (/usr/spool/news/.arXXXXXX).  However if you are
running Larry Walls rn news reading program, and have installed the patches for
the Xref: patch, you'll find nothing is written into ARTICLE until AFTER the
call on control() occurs inside inews.c.  The simplest method around it I found
is to use INFILE = (/usr/spool/news/.inXXXXXX) which is a temporary file that
holds the body of the article.  I'm sure there's a much cleaner fix, but I
could care less.

The real question is how come no one else ever noticed this before?  I suspect
no one else runs the checkgroups messages, or just have never installed the
Xref: patches (which is too bad because it works rather well).  Or it's already
been fixed, and I just don't know about it (highly likely).

---- OLD code in c_checkgroups() in control.c
	sprintf(bfr, "sed '1,/^$/d' %s | %s/checkgroups %s",
		ARTICLE, LIB, (TELLME && *TELLME) ? TELLME : NEWSUSR);
	rc = system(bfr);
	log("system(%s) status %d", bfr, rc);

---- NEW code in c_checkgroups() in control.c
	sprintf(bfr, "cat %s | %s/checkgroups %s",
		INFILE, LIB, (TELLME && *TELLME) ? TELLME : NEWSUSR);
	rc = system(bfr);
	log("system(%s) status %d", bfr, rc);
--
Address: William P. Malloy, ITT Telecom, B & CC Engineering Group, Raleigh NC
         {ihnp4!mcnc, burl, ncsu, decvax!ittvax}!ittral!malloy