[news.sysadmin] Running pathalias directly from the map postings

karl@mstar.UUCP (Karl Fox) (02/24/88)

I have worked out a simple scheme for running map files through
pathalias without having to keep copies of the unshar'ed files in a
separate directory, but have run into a problem.

My .../comp/mail/maps directory currently contains 101 files, one map
file per posting, with 7 duplications (reposts), giving a grand total
of 94 map files.  My map file directory, however, contains 158 [du].*
separate map files.  This really nips my new unpacking method right in
the bud.

Is this just a temporary situation, caused by the recent change of
comp.mail.maps over to long expiration dates coupled with 'cancel'
messages or use of the 'Supersedes:' header, or has my site just missed
postings, or is this how it's supposed to work?

That's the end of my question. By the way, this is how I would like my
unpacker to work:

Create a Makefile that makes the pathalias output file
(/usr/lib/uucp/paths in my case) dependent on the .../comp/mail/maps
directory, and run make on it periodically from cron.  To rebuild,

    cd .../comp/mail/maps
    (stripshar -u `/bin/ls | sort -nr`; cat .../u.local) |
	    pathalias -options | sort > newpaths
    update paths from newpaths

Stripshar peels the news headers and surrounding extraneous junk off
of the map postings and prints the concatenated files to stdout.  The
-u option says to only process uniq shar output file (map file) names,
thus the reverse numeric sort of the map postings.
-- 
Karl Fox, Morning Star Technologies, Inc.    ...!cbosgd!mstar!karl