mark (09/09/82)
One of the really annoying things about uucp is that when it gets jammed
up, there is no easy way to tell spool files for mail from spool files
for news from any other uux'ed spool files. The only way to tell is
to inspect the D.local file mentioned in the C.remote file, and see if
the command is rnews or rmail. Thus, when things get jammed up, it's
very hard to remove all the backed up news (which was probably received
by the other end days earlier) without losing valuable mail.
The uucp command has an (undocumented) -g (grade) option which specifies
the priority of the transfer. Grades are a character, and appear in the
name of the C file, thus, for C.ucbvaxn1234, the grade is the letter 'n'.
Lower letters in the ASCII sequence mean higher priority. The default
for uucp is 'n', and this can be changed to, say, 'w' with the -gw option
to the uucp command. Alas, the uux command does not have a -g option,
but rather always uses grade 'A', a very high grade. It would seem to
be a good idea to run news at a lower grade - this gives mail higher
priority, and also makes it easier to remove all the news while leaving
mail alone.
The changes to uux.c to support a -g option are trivial and are enclosed
here. Line numbers may vary, depending on what version of uucp you have,
but if you have any trouble with this diff, be guided by your uucp.c,
which has essentially identical code.
I propose the grade 'd' as a standard news grade - this gives it higher
priority than uucp but lower than mail, based on the assumption that
uucp'ed files are longer than news articles. To change news to use
this option, find your uux command and add "-gd" to the list of options.
The location of the command may vary depending on your system - it may
be in your sys or .sys file, or in your source to sendspoolednews, or
in the DFTXMIT define in defs.h.
Of course, making this change does not affect your connected neighbors
in any way, except for the order that news and mail arrive, so there
is no compatibility problem.
Mark
diff -c for uux.c
***************
*** 37,42
int pipein = 0;
int startjob = 1;
int Copy = 1;
char path[MAXFULLNAME];
char cmd[BUFSIZ];
char *ap, *cmdp;
--- 37,43 -----
int pipein = 0;
int startjob = 1;
int Copy = 1;
+ char Grade = 'A';
char path[MAXFULLNAME];
char cmd[BUFSIZ];
char *ap, *cmdp;
***************
*** 69,74
case 'c':
Copy = 0;
break;
case 'x':
Debug = atoi(&argv[1][2]);
if (Debug <= 0)
--- 70,78 -----
case 'c':
Copy = 0;
break;
+ case 'g':
+ Grade = argv[1][2];
+ break;
case 'x':
Debug = atoi(&argv[1][2]);
if (Debug <= 0)
***************
*** 345,351
fclose(fpc);
if (cflag) {
! gename(CMDPRE, xsys, 'A', cfile);
link(tcfile, cfile);
unlink(tcfile);
if (startjob)
--- 349,355 -----
fclose(fpc);
if (cflag) {
! gename(CMDPRE, xsys, Grade, cfile);
link(tcfile, cfile);
unlink(tcfile);
if (startjob)