Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!news
From: wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: RN kill-filing of all but certain subjects
Summary: I tried the "/foo/:M followed by cy" solution & got weird results.
Message-ID: <1990Feb4.191613.16386@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 4 Feb 90 19:16:13 GMT
References: <1990Feb3.213343.27579@athena.mit.edu> <34108@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
Organization: Northeastern University
Lines: 67


In article <34108@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, David Goldfarb said:

> A method that I just tested and seems to work is this:
> 
> /(whatever you're interested in)/:M 
>                                   (note the upper case M!)
>        This takes the articles that you're interested in and marks
> them to return. Then when you enter the article selection level
> use the 'c' command.

I received similar advice via email from a few people, so I tried it.
It didn't work very well.  Here's what happened:

The relevant line in my .newsrc file was

	rec.games.frp: 1-18600

and my ~/News/rec/games/frp/Kill file, it its entirety, was

	THRU 18600
	/navero/:M

and this is what happened, with the important stuff highlighted...

	athena% rn
	
	Unread news in rec.games.frp           14 articles
	Unread news in rec.arts.startrek        2 articles
	Unread news in rec.arts.sf-lovers       2 articles
	Unread news in rec.arts.movies          5 articles
	Unread news in rec.arts.tv              1 article
	etc.
	
	********  14 unread articles in rec.games.frp--read now? [ynq] 
	Looking for articles to kill...
	
	/navero/:M
!!!--->	18491 	Will return
	
	Type space to continue]
	
	Article 18601 (13 more + 1 Marked to return)) in rec.games.frp:
	From: wt0b+@andrew.cmu.edu (William Henry Timmins)
	Subject: Re: Adversaries
	Date: 3 Feb 90 23:03:56 GMT
	Lines: 19
	In-Reply-To: <1990Feb3.162751.10607@sci.ccny.cuny.edu>
	
	--MORE--(30%) c
	Do you really want to mark everything as read? [yn] y
	
	Returning 1 Marked article...
	End of newsgroup rec.games.frp.
	

As you can see, even though every article up to and including #18600
was already marked as read (according to my .newsrc), and even though
the THRU line of the kill file said "18600," RN somehow decided to
scan _backwards_ into articles with numbers < 18600 until it found a
match on the character string it was looking for.

Am I still doing something wrong, or is there a problem with the
version of RN I'm using?

----
William December Starr <wdstarr@athena.mit.edu>