[net.sources] Splitting up your newsgroups

jvc@stl.UUCP (Vic Churchill) (05/16/86)

I used to find that there were some newsgroups that I just
never got round to reading because they were so far down my
.newsrc... until I saw the light. 
The following csh hack gives you a different .newsrc each day of
the week ; you split your .newsrc into five pieces
.newsrc.<Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu,Fri> and then select the appropriate
one for the day. That way there is some chance that you can
keep up with the smaller number of groups.

***** put this in your .login ****
set today=`date`
set todays_newsrc=.newsrc.`echo $today | sed "s/^\(...\).*/\1/"`
ln `echo $todays_newsrc` .newsrc
alias rn ~/.my.rn
*****
<You might hope that just doing a 'ln' would do, and that rn
would then update .newsrc.xxx when you read news.
Unfortunately the 'ln' alone is not enough; rn makes its own
copy of what it sees as .newsrc and works on that one. So
you need the '.my.rn' to restore your .newsrc.xxx . >
afterwards:
***** put this in .my.rn ****
#! /bin/csh -f
rn
set today=`date`
set todays_newsrc=~/.newsrc.`echo $today | sed "s/^\(...\).*/\1/"`
echo Copying .newsrc to `echo $todays_newsrc` ...
cp ~/.newsrc `echo $todays_newsrc` 
*****
Bugs: don't be reading news at midnight. Also, you see
things twice if the same newsgroup appears on two different days.
--
the main educational value of kids' toys is to give them
experience of clearing things up when they've finished.
Vic Churchill (jvc@stl  ...!mcvax!ukc!stl!jvc  +44-279-29531 x 2546)