Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!unix.cis.pitt.edu!jonathan
From: jonathan@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Jonathan  Eunice)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Need help from rn guru
Message-ID: <22181@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
Date: 7 Feb 90 22:54:48 GMT
References: <22162@unix.cis.pitt.edu> <51813@bbn.COM>
Reply-To: jonathan@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Jonathan  Eunice)
Organization: University of Pittsburgh Computer Science
Lines: 36

Joel B. Levin (levin@BBN.COM) writes:
| [ Jonathan Eunice writes: ]
| | I would find it enormously valuable to be able to issue an m-nk command
| | in rn.  While rn will let me do an m-nj, it does not accept k after a
| | range.  . . .
| 
| I don't understand what m-nk would be expected to do.  k doesn't take
| an article argument, it takes a (possibly implicit) regular expression
| (search) argument.  j takes (possibly implicit) article number
| arguments, so m-nj makes sense.  I can't make sense out of m-nk.

I think of k as applying to the current article, not to a regular
expression.  m-nk would then be:

	for (i = m; i <= n; i++)  /* loop from m to n inclusive */
	{
		i k		  /* junk all articles with the same
				     subject as article i */
	}

This operation may not be semantically clean, but it would be
enormously valuable at quickly removing the many articles that I do not
want to read in high-volume newsgroups.  It would let me see a listing
of articles (with =), scan though those that I do not want to read, and
kill many entire threads with one command.  (A true thread-based reader
would be a better solution, but I'm trying to make a small, practical
step here.)

I'm aware that a naive implementation of m-nk might try to kill a
single subject several times -- once for each appearance in the range
m-n.  I'm fully prepared to pay the nominal machine overhead for this
because I believe it will save me a lot of my own time.

Jonathan Eunice
jonathan@unix.cis.pitt.edu
412-682-1368