rac@sherpa.uucp (Roger Cornelius) (06/23/91)
Recently I converted from Bnews to Cnews and had a problem with the history file which had me pulling my hair for few a days. After building and installing the software, I rm'd the Bnews history file and ran mkhistory to rebuild it. There is a bit of code in mkhistory which builds a list of the directories to search for news articles: cd $NEWSARTS them= for f in `ls | egrep -v '\.'` do if test -d $f then them="$them $f" fi done On this system, $NEWSARTS is a mounted filesystem and one of it's directories is lost+found. lost+found has rwx------ perms and is owned by bin. When the find command which follows the above code attempts to search lost+found, it quits with an error message and consequently fails to search the rest of the news directories in the list for articles. So history wasn't built correctly, and expire wasn't expiring the articles mkhistory missed. I didn't notice that articles weren't being expired until several days later. I never bothered to check the window I ran mkhistory in to see if it failed or succeeded or I would have noticed the error from find. Once I discovered the cause, my solution was to change the "test" in the above code to make sure a directory is readable before adding it to the list to be searched: cd $NEWSARTS them= for f in `ls | egrep -v '\.'` do if test -d $f -a -r $f then them="$them $f" fi done Maybe this should be changed in the Cnews distribution? -- Roger Cornelius rac@sherpa.UUCP uunet!sherpa!rac
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (06/25/91)
In article <1991Jun22.233741.11143@sherpa.uucp> rac@sherpa.uucp (Roger Cornelius) writes: >On this system, $NEWSARTS is a mounted filesystem and one of it's >directories is lost+found. lost+found has rwx------ perms and is >owned by bin. When the find command which follows the above code >attempts to search lost+found, it quits ... >Once I discovered the cause, my solution was to change the "test" in >the above code to make sure a directory is readable ... Changes along these lines are in the working copy of mkhistory here, and will be in the next patch (soon). Only readable directories go in the search list, and lost+found never goes in even if it is readable. -- "We're thinking about upgrading from | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology SunOS 4.1.1 to SunOS 3.5." | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry