avolio@decuac.UUCP (Frederick M. Avolio) (09/13/85)
I made a few minor change. Two to get it to work. One to lessen its abusiveness to the CPU (while maintaining a high level of abuse...). NEW vs OLD 16c16 < set `date` --- > `date` 23d22 < export selectgroups 174a174 > 185a186 > find $base_dir -mtime -14 -name .newsrc -print >$filefile 187d187 < find /u1/*/.newsrc /u2/*/.newsrc -mtime -14 -print >$filefile Now, you can make the find more general by awk-ing and sed-ing the password file for a list of login directories. But come-on! In any event, no need for "find" to go down each tree so far when you are really only lookign for something on the login directory level. Fred (not Blonder) Avolio
reid@Glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (09/15/85)
Oh come on, people! Here is how to find the .newsrc files without searching
the entire file system:
awk -F: '{printf "if test -f %s/.newsrc; then echo %s/.newsrc; fi\n",$6,$6}' </etc/passwd | sh | sort -u > $filefile
Before you go saying that it ought to be done using ls instead of all those
test -f commands, let me remind you that there is a limit to the size of
argv on an exec, and glacier's /etc/passwd has enough entries to tickle it.
--
Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid
Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPAdavid@ukma.UUCP (David Herron, NPR Lover) (09/16/85)
In article <11824@Glacier.ARPA> reid@Glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid) writes: >Oh come on, people! Here is how to find the .newsrc files without searching >the entire file system: > >awk -F: '{printf "if test -f %s/.newsrc; then echo %s/.newsrc; fi\n",$6,$6}' </etc/passwd | sh | sort -u > $filefile Err, uuhh, sorry. I did it the way I did on purpose. The original subscribers program I had did it pretty much the way you did it. However, at our site we have some shared accounts. The people sharing the accounts have their own "home directory" and are telling rn that DOTDIR is elsewhere than HOME. So if I just went around looking for $HOME/.newsrc as above I'd miss some. BTW. If you didn't notice in the script, I set $BASEDIR (whatever..) to /usr/user which is actually the base of our user's directory tree. So I'm *NOT* searching the entire filesystem. Not even most of it. (We have sources for too many versions of Unix on line for that!) -- --- David Herron --- ARPA-> ukma!david@ANL-MCS.ARPA --- UUCP-> {ucbvax,unmvax,boulder,oddjob}!anlams!ukma!david --- {ihnp4,decvax,ucbvax}!cbosgd!ukma!david Hackin's in me blood. My mother was known as Miss Hacker before she married!
heiby@cuae2.UUCP (Heiby) (09/16/85)
In article <11824@Glacier.ARPA> reid@Glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid) writes: >Oh come on, people! Here is how to find the .newsrc files without searching >the entire file system: > >awk -F: '{printf "if test -f %s/. ... etc. This message (and I believe at least one of the preceding ones) ignores the fact that the NEWSRC environment variable can be used to move the .newsrc around. It doesn't have to reside in the user's home directory. Of course, if the user changes the file name as well as the directory then there's not much hope of finding it. -- Ron Heiby {NAC|ihnp4}!cuae2!heiby Moderator: mod.newprod & mod.unix AT&T-IS, /app/eng, Lisle, IL (312) 810-6109 "No; my legs are written in a functional programming language." (J. McKie)
bill@persci.UUCP (09/17/85)
All this discussion about .newsrc reading script presupposes that every user
maintains his .newsrc file. That is not true at this site. Some people are
subscribed to *everything* and never read news, others drop in on newsgroups
as they will, never subscribing/unsubscribing.
When we set up accelerated expirations for unread newsgroups (net.flame, etc)
recently, we polled everybody (and read their .newsrc files). There was little
significant correlation between the two sets of results.
--
William Swan {ihnp4,decvax,allegra,...}!uw-beaver!tikal!persci!billdavid@ukma.UUCP (David Herron, NPR Lover) (09/19/85)
In article <405@persci.UUCP>, bill@persci.UUCP writes: > All this discussion about .newsrc reading script presupposes that every user > maintains his .newsrc file. That is not true at this site. Some people are > subscribed to *everything* and never read news, others drop in on newsgroups > as they will, never subscribing/unsubscribing. This is a *known*problem*, and I did put in a heuristic to get rid of some of this .... very simply. If the last read article number is LESS THAN the LEAST article number in the group then this datum is tossed out. The only better method for getting around this is to keep some running statistics between runs of the program. You'd be looking for things like the amount of traffic in the group versus any reading done in the group. F'r instance, if somebody didn't read a group for a week then he's not really reading it. But that seemed like to much to bite off for a project that was supposed to fill a weekend... While I have your attention ... I found another problem today .. The sed script depends on a particular variable being exported to the environment. But my script (as distributed) doesn't do this. (It exports an entirely different variable....) To solve this I simply exported everything! Also, I added a PATH definition so I could run the program from cron as root (thereby see a lot of .newsrc files I miss if running as news). Anybody feel like volunteering for making it keep running statistics? -- --- David Herron --- ARPA-> ukma!david@ANL-MCS.ARPA --- UUCP-> {ucbvax,unmvax,boulder,oddjob}!anlams!ukma!david --- {ihnp4,decvax,ucbvax}!cbosgd!ukma!david Hackin's in me blood. My mother was known as Miss Hacker before she married!
sewilco@mecc.UUCP (Scot E. Wilcoxon) (09/23/85)
In article <405@persci.UUCP>, bill@persci.UUCP writes: > All this discussion about .newsrc reading script presupposes that every user > maintains his .newsrc file. That is not true at this site. Some people are > subscribed to *everything* and never read news, others drop in on newsgroups > as they will, never subscribing/unsubscribing. I've been designing an automatic news feed blocker (more later) which has to know which groups are NOT being read. In my ignorance, I assumed that .newsrc might not be valid so I looked for another way to globally detect a group which is not being read. The "time last accessed" (st_atime in stat) lets you detect an article which has been read since the "time last modified" (st_mtime). Normally, an article is only written when it is created so st_mtime is time of creation. An article which has never been read will have st_atime == st_mtime. An unread newsgroup is one in which no articles have been read. However, news reading programs which use the "active" file might not bother scanning a newsgroup which has had no articles posted. So the stat information is only valid when a group has articles stored, thus a program to scan the groups probably should be run just before "expire" is run. A variation on the theme is checking if the group's directory has been accessed since it was modified. This can detect a news reader scanning a directory for expected articles, even if the directory is empty. On a site which is passing on batched news, the news batcher does "read" the articles which it passes on. That is a desirable side effect for my application. Possibly not for yours... Note that detecting a group which is not being read can be a slightly different problem than detecting one which is being read. It's a matter of whether it is safer to detect too few or too many groups of the desired status. -- Scot E. Wilcoxon Minn. Ed. Comp. Corp. circadia!mecc!sewilco 45 03 N / 93 15 W (612)481-3507 {ihnp4,uwvax}!dicomed!mecc!sewilco