mp@mit-eddie.UUCP (Mark Plotnick) (10/08/83)
Has anyone gotten the N command to work right when it's given an argument? I often find that when I do "N newsgroup", readnews spins its wheels awhile and gives me the LOWEST EXISTING ARTICLE in that newsgroup, even though I've read ahead further. (it actually tries all articles from 1 on up.) To be more precise: If I am at article 171 of 179 in net.cog-eng, and type "N net.lang" (which has 184 articles, all of which I've seen), selectng nulls out groupdir (it doesn't change bit at all), and getnextart begins looking for articles /usr/spool/news/171, /usr/spool/news/172, ... /usr/spool/news/184 (that's right, the groupdir is now 0-length, so that getnextart is looking for articles directly under the spool directory!) It eventually returns me to the net.cog-eng article. This only happens because 184 > 171 (or perhaps because 184 > 179). The other problem is with the variable 'bit' being set to 0 at the wrong time. Suppose I'm at article 691 of net.general, and I type "N net.followup". I've read 851 out of the 854 articles in net.followup, but somehow it's looking through every one starting at 1. But if I had just done "N", I would have been plunked into net.followup at just the right article (852). Why? In the former case, next_ng_command sets readmode to SPEC for some reason. selectng sets bit to 0, then calls nextbit, which sets bit to 1 (remember, readmode==SPEC), then returns. In the latter case, readmode != SPEC, and nextbit sets bit to the next article to be read, 852. Is there any reason next_ng_command should set readmode to SPEC? Mark