pat@kla (02/11/90)
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I have just posted to alt.sources an improved arbitron program written
in perl. I am considering this to be a beta version until I hear
positive results from other sites.
I will gladly e-mail copies to anyone who does not get alt.sources.
Some of the advantages of the perl arbitron.
1) Greater portability.
Perl runs on a lot more systems than you can find compatible
versions of Bourne shell, sed, awk, etc.. (i.e. AmigaDOS)
2) More accurate reporting if the local expiration rate is very high.
The shell script compared .newsrc contents against the active
file. This version keeps an optional arb.last file to compare
against.
3) No temporary files.
4) Can be run on systems which do not support multi-tasking.
5) If your mailer allows the specification of the subject as
a command line parameter, this program will generate a
subject line of the form `arbitron data for MonYYYY'.
6) Direct connection to NNTP socket in distributed environment.
(Perl 3.0 is required for this option.)
7) Much easier to read.
(Unless you are an awk/sed/sh wizard :-)
Disadvantages:
1) This version is slower than the Bourne shell version.
(about 50% on a Sun3/60 running SunOS 3.5)
Other differences:
1) Obtaining count of valid users:
The script defaults to accepting all users within the specified
range of userids; but provides optional mechanisms for counting
actual userids stored in the wtmp(5) file.
This program provides a generalized filter capability which can
easily check the value of any of the fields from the password
file. It was felt that this is a more useful mechanism in
a networked environment.
The current version does not have support for nn history files or
notesfiles because I have no idea what the filenames or formats are,
and I'm not about to attempt to figure it out from the existing
arbitron scripts. If someone will mail me that information, I will
gladly include support in future versions. (My goal is a single,
readable, arbitron script suitable for any site which can support both
news and perl.)
-Pat
Copyright (c) 1989 PM Lashley under the terms of the GNU General Public License
PMLashley ...{sun | megatest | sts | zygot}!cohesive!kla!pat
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