rd@tarpit.uucp (Bob Thrush) (07/20/89)
I have noticed that all the active articles posted from C News
systems have a "Lines:" header (except for the first few I did :-<).
Yet the source distribution has the pertinent code in relay/sh/inews
commented out. In fact, it appears that code (when uncommented)
calculates one line too many. Has everybody quietly added the
Lines: header to C News? (Even Henry's postings have Lines.)
For what it's worth, here's how I mangled the commented code:
TLINES="`
if test -r $HOME/.signature; then
(cat $inbody; echo '-- '; sed 4q $HOME/.signature) | wc -l
else
wc -l <$inbody
fi
`"
echo "Lines: `expr $TLINES - 1`"
--
Bob Thrush UUCP: {ucf-cs,rtmvax}!tarpit!rd
Automation Intelligence, 1200 W. Colonial Drive, Orlando, Florida 32804geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) (07/21/89)
Vanilla C inews does not generate Lines: headers and in general produces a fairly minimal set of headers (I initiated getting rid of Posting-Version:, Relay-Version: and Date-Received: headers years ago). Lines: headers are a waste of bytes (a byte count is usually what's wanted and it can be obtained much more reliably via fstat(2) or "ls -l"), and are often wrong due to mangling of either the Lines: headers or the message bodies by intervening networks or mail or news software. (As long as there are B news sites, B news will insert them anyway as the articles propagate.) You may see Lines: headers in articles originating on C news sites because intervening B news sites have lovingly hand-crufted Lines: headers on articles passing through (thus breaking one of the maxims of good performance for network software: though shalt not look at thy bits). We have a slightly better fix in the works which will get the Lines: count right, if you uncomment the code to produce it. I favour deleting the code altogether, but there are some very vocal fans of Lines: nearby. -- Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu ``... skill such as yours is evidence of a misspent youth.'' - Herbert Spencer
nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson) (07/21/89)
In article <1989Jul21.001122.4986@utstat.uucp> geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) writes:
... Lines: headers are a waste of bytes (a byte count is usually what's
wanted and it can be obtained much more reliably via fstat(2) or "ls
-l"), ...
Unless you're accessing the news spool via NNTP, in which case you're out
of luck. Perhaps XHDR can be modified to special-case a pseudo Bytes: header
and return the number of bytes in the file?
--
--russ (nelson@clutx [.bitnet | .clarkson.edu])|(70441.205@compuserve.com)henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (07/21/89)
In article <1989Jul20.054808.8724@tarpit.uucp> rd@tarpit.UUCP (Bob Thrush) writes: > I have noticed that all the active articles posted from C News >systems have a "Lines:" header (except for the first few I did :-<). >Yet the source distribution has the pertinent code in relay/sh/inews >commented out. In fact, it appears that code (when uncommented) >calculates one line too many. Has everybody quietly added the >Lines: header to C News? (Even Henry's postings have Lines.) Some people have indeed uncommented the code (indeed, there is a fix coming to fix the off-by-one error!). However, a good many sites haven't. We certainly haven't. What you are seeing is B News sites gratuitously inserting this header into articles that are just passing through. -- 1961-1969: 8 years of Apollo. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1969-1989: 20 years of nothing.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu