[net.news] Saving a rotated posting UNrotated

wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (05/17/85)

OK, I give up. I've dug through both "rn" and "readnews" help info,
and I can't find the answer to this:

How do I do a "save" of a rotated article so that it is saved
UNrotated, in readable form? There are plenty of ways to DISPLAY
it in readable form, but how do I get those to pipe the readable
form to the "s" save routine?

Will Martin

USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin     or   ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA

lwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall) (05/22/85)

In article <10745@brl-tgr.ARPA> wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) writes:
>How do I do a "save" of a rotated article so that it is saved
>UNrotated, in readable form?

The quick answer is that in either readnews or rn you can pipe the article
through the caesar program.  Of course, the caesar program will try to
translate the header as well as the body, so that's a problem.  It also
doesn't "pipe" the article into the normal save routine, so you have to
supply your own output file name.

To integrate it a little better into rn, you might change NORMSAVER or
MBOXSAVER to point to a private copy of norm.saver or mbox.saver, and then
feed the body of the article through caesar in your version.  The chief
difficulty I see with this is that caesar can get confused on short lines
with little "English" in them, and you would be applying caesar to all
articles, not just encrypted ones.  You really want to use tr rather than
caesar, but only on articles that really are encrypted.

If you have rn 4.3, you might define a macro for saving rotated articles.
It could call a private shell script using the shell escape, or it could
do a normal save command but set up an environment variable that controls
whether your norm.saver/mbox.saver does a tr on the body of the article.

On the other hand, you could just learn to read rot13.

Larry Wall
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!lwall