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From: earle@smeagol.UUCP (Greg Earle)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: An oldie and a newie.
Message-ID: <525@smeagol.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Dec-85 23:27:03 EST
Article-I.D.: smeagol.525
Posted: Tue Dec 17 23:27:03 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Dec-85 05:26:17 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: Spacecraft Data Systems, JPL, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 43

I'm sure this one is as old as the hills, but it's the first time I've ever
encountered it.

In Fred Fish's documentation for his 'DBUG' package, he included the source
for an -mm version of the User's Manual (He forgot to post the files that
are .so'd in there, but what the hell).  It .so's some small files, the
first bunch are short snatches of code.  Well, a coupla lines in these code
files have our old friend ``printf(" TEXT \n", args)''.  Along comes poor
old [nt]roff, which sees these "\n"'s and decides it's trying to tell it to
do something.  So it swallows the \n" whole, and puts out a 0, which looks
just lovely.  Trying to be clever, I thought a double \\ would do the trick,
but I guess when it is interpreting, [nt]roff just swallows the first \,
and decides to evaluate the remaining \n" as a number register; thus the
unwelcome "0".  I went to my moth eaten UNIX Programmer's Manual V 2B, and
tried framing the .so's with .eo (Escape char [\] off) and .ec (Set escape 
character on, \ if no argument).  This didn't work.  So, how do you get
"\n"s into an [nt]roff document without them being interpreted?

Here's a new one.  This really belongs in net.mail, but what the heck.
Has anyone out there had a problem with "sendmail" truncating a long 
list of system names before it sends the mail on to uux or a smart mailer?
I had my hacked version of the Georgia Tech "uumail" print out its argv[3] 
(the destination address) when the destination was 19 sites long, and it got
mangled!  Luckily I caught it and changed the UUCP file before it got sent
out the door.  Specifically, one site away from us replies to news articles
via the strict "From:" field (no smart mailer); we got in one of his replies
that was addressed such that it was supposed to 
'rmail 1!2!3!4!...!17!18!19!username'.  Our
sendmail decided to truncate this address to '1!2!3!4!...12!13!14!15'; 
therefore making the destination "user" machine 15, located at site #14 in 
the chain!  The destination address was truncated at 105 characters, which 
certainly seems like a strange number to me ...

----------
	Greg Earle
	JPL
	..!sdcrdcf!smeagol!earle
	ia-sun2!smeagol!earle@cit-vax.arpa

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