Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bbn!bbn.com!rsalz
From: rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.config
Subject: Re: new survey to supplement arbitron. Please run this program.
Message-ID: <1735@papaya.bbn.com>
Date: 20 May 89 21:54:58 GMT
References: <80@jove.dec.com> <3215@epimass.EPI.COM>
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation
Lines: 28

(Excuse the light-hearted tone; too many Saturday-morning cartoons...)

On our last visit Joe Buck <jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM> pointed out that Brian
Reid's "inpath" screws up with cross-posted articles.  He then provided a
perl program to read the history file.  Brian <everyone knows brian>
subsequently pointed out that not everyone has perl, and that reading
internal data files is not a good thing.

Fear not, gentle fellows.  How about this?  Use the :F: flag in your news
sys file to write the article pathnames into a file, then run a small
script monthly out of cron to invoke inpaths.  Something like this:
    /usr/lib/news/sys:
	survey:all:F:/usr/spool/batch/survey
    /usr/lib/crontab:
	2 10 1 * * /usr/lib/news/doinpaths
    /usr/lib/news/doinpaths:
	cd /usr/spool/batch
	touch survey.work
	cat survey >>survey.work
	cp /dev/null survey
	/usr/lib/news/inpaths -l <survey.work | mail pathsurvey@decwrl.dec.com
	rm survey.work

The only question:  do you have enough space to store the pathnames of
a months worth of news?
	/rich $alz
-- 
Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net.