earle@smeagol.UUCP (Greg Earle) (12/12/85)
Here's a handy little script I use to at-a-glance see what is in
the news articles that are currently available in a newsgroup or
groups. For some groups (like this one), I keep archives for a ways
back, so even though I've read the articles, I might want to go
back to one and build the tool that was in it. I use this script
to peruse the contents of a group or groups, to see which articles
have what I'm looking for (or not looking for) in it. The number of
the article is given, along with a summary taken from the header
'Subject:' line. The output of this script is suitable for page or more.
Greg Earle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Spacecraft Data Systems group
UUCP: ..!sdcrdcf!smeagol!earle
ARPA: ia-sun2!smeagol!earle@cit-vax.arpa
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#! /bin/sh
#
# whatisin : Bourne Shell script to tell you what is the contents
# of a particular news group. Uses the Subject: header line (presumed
# to be the best indicator).
# Called via 'whatisin <newsgroup> <newsgroup2> ...',
# e.g. 'whatisin net.sources.bugs'
# Edit next line as appropriate for your system
NEWSDIR="/usr/spool/news"
for i in $*
do
# There are newlines inserted here via ^V^J
echo "
Contents of" $i ":
"
DESTDIR=`echo $i | sed 's?\.?/?g'`
cd ${NEWSDIR}/$DESTDIR
# We look at all the files in the directory the slow way, because
# if you keep news archives for certain directories around for a while,
# (like I do at this site), you may have too many files, and a
# grep * will blow up on "too many arguments"
for a in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
do
if [ -f ./${a}* ]
then
# Note that this next line is broken by postings that contain
# Mail headers from previous posts that contain a ^Subject:
# line in the included mail message. In some cases this is
# not necessarily a bad thing, try running this on a digested
# news group like mod.computers.sun/Sun-Spots
grep "^Subject:" ${a}* /dev/null | sed 's/Subject://g'
fi
done | sort -n
echo "--------------------------------------------------------------"
done