jack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen) (08/25/84)
[This is probably a very stupid remark, but I'm virtually immune
to flaming, so here goes:]
As I understand, batched news looks like
#! news 123
<123 lines of article>
#! news 34
etc.
Now, if someone underway screws the 123, or maybe even if it
looses the following newline, or whatever, news might think the
article has -1 lines, or 65535, or whatever garbage was in the
variable before it was used to read '123' lines.
If this is the case, it might be a good idea to do some kind
of checking, like a checksum on the article, or on the number
of lines at least. Maybe something like multiplying the number
by seven, or another prime.
Jack Jansen, {philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jack