alexis@panix.UUCP (Alexis Rosen) (09/21/90)
Here's a Bnews bug, and one way to fix it. It's in version 2.11 (2.11.18?)
The sendbatch is marked as version 1.22, 10/29/89.
The symptom: News postings never make it off your machine.
There seems to be a small bug in sendbatch. It tries to figure out how much
space is being used by a particular UUCP partner's files, in order to prevent
overflowing the disk. It runs du on /usr/spool/uucp/{your uucp partner}.
It's clever enough not to run du if the directory isn't there. Unfortunately,
it uses the result of the du in an expr command. This is an error, since the
result of the du was never created in the first place, and the script aborts.
The easy workaround is to make a directory in /usr/spool/news, named with your
uucp partner's name. Of course, this doesn't check to see how much space
batches for your partner are taking. If you want to do that, you'll need to
modify the sendbatch script, replacing the du command with one that totals up
the usage of each file going to that system. I don't think this is a really
good idea.
This works on A/UX 2.0. I can't imagine that it's true on all System V
machines with old UUCP. So, would someone who runs Bnews on such a system
please tell me what their sendbatch does?
Alexis Rosen
A/UX Victim (but lots happier since 2.0 came out)
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis