wall@ucbvax.UUCP (05/19/84)
I was reading news tonight on a remote machine when my home machine crashed, and when I started Readnews up after a reboot I noticed my .newsrc file wasn't updated (a *real* pain if you've just read a bunch of mail). Does anyone know why Readnews doesn't seem to handle this situation very gracefully? I'm sure that it traps most signals, but a SIGHUP (?) doesn't seem to be handled well. Any insight is appreciated.... Steve ucbvax!ucbarpa!wall wall@ucbarpa
mike@BRL-TGR.ARPA (05/22/84)
From: Mike Muuss <mike@BRL-TGR.ARPA> Actually your problem is harder than catching SIGHUP. The authors of the 4.2 BSD TELNET Daemon (/etc/telnetd) send a KILL signal to the process group of the pseudo-tty when the connection closes, just moments after the processes get SIGHUP'ed. This almost assures you of incorrect .newsrc, etc, files -- just enough time to creat(), then Blam! If I knew just what this was supposed to fix I'd start thinking about taking it out... -Mike Muuss
geoff@utcsstat.UUCP (Geoff Collyer) (05/23/84)
Readnews actually catches SIGHUP (a hangup signal) and last time I tried it, it updated my .newsrc (which was a real pain since I was planning to type x to get out without update). Readnews might still be susceptible to multiple hangups in rapid succession (depending upon your kernel's treatment of signals), or perhaps was hit by a SIGKILL due to 4.2BSD's rlogin. Readnews is far too cavalier about rewriting .newsrc and has trashed enough .newsrc's that I copy my .newsrc to a backup file before I read news. Don't confuse B news with production software. Remember, B news is Bad news.
jerryp@tektronix.UUCP (Jerry Peek) (05/29/84)
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Our version of "readnews" has a -u option. It updates the .newsrc file
at the end of each newsgroup read, or every five minutes, whichever is
longer.
--Jerry Peek, UNIX Training Instructor, Tektronix, Inc.
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