Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!cpsolv!rhg
From: rhg@cpsolv.CPS.COM (Richard H. Gumpertz)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Avoiding multiple copies of news messages
Message-ID: <500@cpsolv.CPS.COM>
Date: 14 Feb 90 18:07:10 GMT
References: <3235@taux01.UUCP>
Reply-To: rhg@cpsolv.uucp (Richard H. Gumpertz)
Organization: Computer Problem Solving, Leawood, Kansas
Lines: 23

In article <3235@taux01.UUCP> crehta@taux01.nsc.com (Ran Ever-Hadani) writes:
>I looking for a way to avoid the problem of having many users saving
>multiple copies of news messages;  my problem has to do mostly with
>large documents distributed via local newsgroups, documents that many
>people may like to save.
>
>What comes to mind is a package that will maintain a common area in
>which a single copy of any news article saved will reside; every user
...

Assuming you are on a Unix system: just have the user do an "ln" to the news
file.  The file will go away when all users have deleted their links AND the
article has been expired.  Of course, you might want to build a shell script
or macro to do the linking for the user, but the central part of the function
would be something like the following:
	ln /usr/spool/news/comp/sources/wanted/3317 myfilename
This lets the Unix file system do all the hard part of maintaining reference
counts, etc., for the file.
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