sjb (11/17/82)
How about a flag that specifies an Article-I.D. (i.e. sysname.###) to be read. Very often friends write to me saying read so-and-so an Article-I.D. for a laugh (or whatever) So I have to go through the history file, find where it is, and then cat it. Readnews supplies Article-I.D.'s as part of the header but does nothing else with them. Since their only benefit to the reader (I am not counting their obvious use in discarding dup articles) is for the above kind of purpose (telling someone to read a particular article, etc.) and to remember a certain article for later reference, why not let a person specify an Article-I.D. to be read? Since -a is already used by readnews, how about -A ? e.g. readnews -A alice.1137 would fetch this article. The option wouldn't care whether or not an article was read already, since the person is just going for one particular article.